Into Our World: Reality's Orphans
by Meriem Clayton
Summary: Season 9 spoilers. Daniel is suddenly the father of four children. It changes everything for Sam who also has a link to them, whether Jack wants to admit it or not. Sequel in Into Our World: Reality's Orphans.
1. Chapter 1

This story was written strictly for the purpose of entertainment. No attempt has been made to copyright any characters which may not have been originally created by the author, and no profit is made from this work of fiction. Any original characters and the stories themselves are the property of the author.

Warning – Not an S/J story

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2007

Colonel Samantha Carter heard a throat being cleared and looked up from the journal article that had so totally engrossed her that she hadn't realized she wasn't alone. She was delighted to discover Dr. Daniel Jackson standing just inside her open office door. "You have a minute?" he asked. He sounded tentative and it almost seemed he was hoping the answer would be no.

"Of course, any time," Sam said. She had seen so little of Daniel since he had left SG-1 in order to limit the amount of time he spent off planet. It had been worse, in a way, than when she had been in Washington with Cassie for a few months. They'd talked on the phone then more then than they talked in person now. He was right here in close physical proximity, but there just never seemed to be opportunities to get together. "Have a seat," she invited, looking forward to some time with her old friend.

Daniel looked at the chair dubiously, as if afraid of committing himself to that long of a stay, but then sat down. He instantly went boneless and sagged back in the chair. "Tired?" Sam asked.

"Very," he replied. "Catherine and Mitch both had retro virus for over a week. I didn't know the universe contained that much vomit."

"You should ask for help," Sam said, concerned by how truly depleted Daniel seemed to be.

"Really?" Daniel asked. He pulled himself together and more or less sat up straight. "That's the thing, Sam. You blow so hot and cold about my kids. One week you act like they've got nothing to do with you and the next week you're offering to help."

Sam felt immediately defensive. She felt guilty on some level about Daniel's kids all the time. "They really aren't mine," she said.

"So that's the mode I've caught you in," he said. "That makes this easier. Look Sam, all four of them are confused and in pain, but the two little ones have focused on wanting a mother. Mitch and Catherine look at you and they almost see one and sometimes you almost act like one and then," he blew out a long breath, "I don't know, Jack throws a hissy because you're involved with my kids instead of totally focused on him or your own issues rise up and bite you in the ass and you back off. They don't understand that." He raked his hand through hair grown shaggier in the past year. "I came to ask you to stay away from them, just resist the temptation when you're in motherly mood and stay away. It's messing with them."

"Oh, really," Sam said. Her eyes stung. She cared about the kids. She just wasn't ready to take the fallout in her relationship with Jack if she let them become any more important to her. She took a wild potshot. "Is it really the kids or is it you that's having trouble with the competing demands on my time?"

"What the hell is that supposed to mean?" he asked. "You are with Jack. There has never been anything between us. Have you persuaded yourself that I'm carrying a torch for you or something?"

Sam couldn't believe how fast this had gotten ugly. What had happened to the comfortable friendship that had sustained her for years? Ever since she'd told Daniel that she and Jack were finally together, he'd become more and more distant. Then the children had come into his life and he never had time for anything but his work and his family. Was her wild accusation really a realization that had been at the back of her mind for awhile? She chose to pretend she hadn't heard him. "I think you have stated your position quite clearly. I will be more than happy to stay away from you and your little family. Now if you wouldn't mind, I have work to do."

That weekend, she was still fuming over the exchange and over Cameron Mitchell's subsequent siding with Daniel. Jack was becoming seriously annoyed at the number of times she had brought the subject up. He had, indeed, grown increasingly jealous over her relationship with Daniel ever since Daniel had taken the kids in. Finally he exploded. "Look, Sam. My job is just full of people yammering on about problems. You're my lover. Being with you is supposed to be a respite from my job, not more of the same."

"That's lovely Jack," she said. "I'm supposed to be-what?-a tension relief service? That's not what a relationship is about." Irritated with herself, she thought, to think that I've been a little depressed all afternoon because Jack is still being vague about when we're actually going to get married. Jack was only the third man she'd had any kind of ongoing sexual relationship with and she'd been engaged to the other two. It felt wrong and it was starting to make her feel like she'd sold herself cheap.

"I don't suppose we're going to do anything FUN for hours, are we?" he asked, jerking his head toward the stairs to upstairs and the bedroom to underscore what he meant by fun.

"Maybe not at all," Sam said, her voice full of icicles. This was turning into quite the week so far, featuring hideous arguments with all the men prominent in her life except Teal'c.

Jack glared at her, grabbed the remote, and turned on a hockey game. He cranked the volume up and tuned her out. She decided to go take a nice long bath. She was naked and about to get into the Jacuzzi when the phone rang. And rang. And rang. Jack wouldn't answer it, she knew, because there was little or no chance it would be for him and he was still preserving the fiction that their relationship was some sort of secret from the general public. She sighed and walked out into the bedroom, feeling curiously vulnerable, although she was alone and the curtains were drawn.

"Sam, is he there?" It was Daniel's voice, so distraught as to be almost unrecognizable.

"Is who here?" she asked.

"Mitch."

"What would Mitch be doing here?" Sam asked. Surely Daniel wasn't accusing her of kidnapping.

"Catherine got all weepy and started crying for her mother," Daniel said, only a shade calmer. "I think Mitch decided he had to do something about it and he's on his way to demand that you be her mother."

"How can you be sure?"

"I just make stuff like this up for fun," he said with a real bite to his words. "He told her to stop crying and that he would take care of it."

"So what you're saying is that he's run away, right?" Sam said. "When did he leave home?"

"About two hours ago. Jake and Mary Clare didn't call me right away because they thought they could take care of it. They expected to find him within blocks of the house. When I got home around 3:00, he was still missing. I called the police and Jake and I have been driving up and down ever possible route between our house and yours without luck. Catherine is tremendously upset and Mary Clare's with her."

"You want me to go out and look?"

"You need to stay put in case he comes there."

"Jack's here. He could hold down the home front."

Daniel made some sort of low, inarticulate sound, but then said, "Fine. That's good. Thanks, Sam."

Sam hurriedly pulled on a pair of jeans and a sweater and jammed her feet in a pair of boots. She ran lightly down the stairs and found Jack in the kitchen taking a beer out of the refrigerator. "Daniel just called. Mitch's run away and he thinks he is heading here. Can you please stay here in case he shows up while I go and look for him?"

Jack looked serious right away. He loved kids, even if he didn't want any, and he never took a threat to a child lightly. If only that translated to a willingness to have children again or to accepting the unique children that Daniel was raising with their special connection to her. "I think you should stay here. The odds are much better of him finding the house than me finding him, given all the possible ways he could be coming," Jack said.

"You're sure?"

"I'm positive." He kissed her on the forehead, grabbed his keys and his jacket and was out the door.

She sat and looked moodily into the fire. She dreaded dealing with Mitch in full cry. The little boy was the most like Daniel of the four children in several respects. He was arguably the most brilliant and spoke very seriously in adult tones as if he was years older. He cared about everyone and was the most tenderhearted for his little sister Catherine. It was hard looking into that young face, so earnestly pleading, not for himself but for someone else, and finding the strength to say no.

An hour went by, in many ways an eternity. She only had a good fix on the length of time from the way the fire was burning down. Every little sound had her on edge and she yanked open the door several times to see nothing but snowflakes. She thought about getting a glass of wine or a beer but she wanted to be alert if he showed up. At last, she heard the doorbell. She raced to the door and opened it to find Daniel, not Mitch.

He looked surprised. "You were expecting Jack?" she asked.

"I guess I was."

"He thought it would be better if I stayed put. He's out looking."

"That's good of him," Daniel said. He stamped off snow and came in. "It's getting colder out there. Why did that kid have to pick when it was snowing? I tried to call and the phone was busy and your cell didn't answer. I was hoping…"

Sam realized she had probably put the phone on the cradle crookedly in her haste earlier to be gone looking. What bad timing to do that at the same time she apparently had her cell on vibrate instead of the ringer and stuck it in her purse. "He's not here. I'm sorry about the phone. Let me go fix it. You need to warm up a little. Let me make you a cup of coffee before you go back out."

A little later, Daniel sat studying the light brown liquid in his cup. "Sam I owe you an apology. I got rather nasty the last time we spoke. It's just…I look at those kids and they make me wonder at times if you and I could have taken a different turn. I get mad at myself for even speculating about it idly when there's my good friend Jack and you're with him."

He hadn't said he was carrying a torch but it was an admission of caring. Sam felt a rush of happiness, instantly followed by an even greater wash of guilt. Was she such an egotist that she wanted men falling for her right and left, even men for whom there was no chance of ever returning the favor? She simply looked at him and admitted softly, "They make me wonder a little too." She didn't really know that to be true until she heard it come out of her mouth.

Five minutes later, the doorbell sounded again and Sam opened it to find Mitch. She immediately engulfed him in a fierce hug. "Come right in here and warm up," she commanded. "Do you have any idea how worried we've been about you?"

"I'm sorry," he said "but no one would bring me to see you and I just knew you'd have more trouble saying no to my face."

Sam closed the door and immediately set to helping Mitch divest himself of his coat. "Your dad's here. Come into the kitchen and let me make you some hot chocolate."

"Dad Daniel is here?" he said, dismayed. "I need time to talk to you."

Daniel had appeared, having heard the voices. He immediately scooped Mitch up and held the 8-year old tight. "Don't ever do that to me again Mitch. I'm too old."

Sam was holding out the hot chocolate and Daniel deposited the boy on one of the bar stools at the counter between the kitchen and the great room. He leaned over to be at eye level. "You get one shot to say whatever you have to say to Colonel Sam but you've got to promise me if we give you time for that, you'll not bring it up to her again." Mitch looked mulish. "The alternative is I take you home right now. Well?"

"Okay," the child said reluctantly. "I will only tell her once."

"Then let me call your brother first and tell him to go home and let me call Mary Clare and Catherine so they won't worry any more." Daniel pulled out his cell phone and walked off to the other end of the room to make his calls.

Sam sat down across from Mitch. Her knees felt weak in reaction. This was another reason she had shied away from tearing down her emotional barriers. Worrying about children was so much worse than facing danger yourself. This could be Cassie times four and then some. She put one hand over his left hand. "Drink your hot chocolate," she said. "You need to get warm."

"So do you," he said, very seriously.

The door to the garage opened and Jack came in, interrupting whatever Mitch was planning on saying next. They all turned to look at him. "You found him. That's great. It's getting cold out there." He walked into the room and smiled at Mitch. "Hi, Mitch."

The little boy looked at him unhappily. "Hello General O'Neill." His voice sounded very disappointed.

Jack looked at him quizzically. "What's up?"

Daniel started to say something polite, but he wasn't fast enough. "My sisters and my brother and I need Colonel Sam and so does my dad. We need her more than you do," the boy announced matter of factly. "She would be happier with us. People need lots of people to love."

Jack raised an eyebrow. He looked at Daniel and there was cold fire in his eyes. "You put your kid up to this, Danny Boy?"

Daniel shook his head. "You know better than that Jack."

Jack still looked angry, but he backed down. Mitch struck again. "This was my idea. My dad doesn't do things for himself. He doesn't take care of himself because he's always taking care of us. That's why I came because he would never tell Colonel Sam to come and be with us. He told Catherine that Colonel Sam belonged to his friend and Catherine asked him if that would be like taking toys away from another kid. The thing is, General O'Neill, she isn't a toy. She gets to make decisions for herself."

Sam looked at the little boy, stunned and could tell that Jack was equally dazed. Daniel's mouth had dropped open. He struggled to pull himself together and finally said, "Okay, Mitch. We told you that you could tell Colonel Sam what you thought one time. I think we should leave now."

"I'm not done, Dad."

"I think you are. Go and get your coat." Mitch looked like he might argue with him. Daniel dropped his voice to a gentler tone. "Surely you can see, son, that this isn't the time or place."

"Because of him," Mitch said, pointing at Jack. "General O'Neill, I don't want to be mean or rude or make my dad mad, but I got to say this." He sounded desperate now. "If you don't want to have a family, then you should let Colonel Sam be a mother with us. I can tell when people are happy and she isn't happy, are you Colonel Sam?"

Sam was caught flat-footed. Rather than answer the question, she said, "Mitch, you can't just arrange people's lives because you want them to be a certain way. I love General O'Neill. Your dad and I are not in love." Why did it hurt to say that? She wondered. Why was it was squeezing her heart to look at Daniel and his son right now?

Jack raised his hands in a sort of mock surrender, but to the extent you could read an expression on his face, he wasn't amused. "I think this might be a really good time for me to go buy some more beer."

Sam reached out her hand. "Jack, he's just a kid." Jack was already to the door.

"I'll be back in a few minutes. See yah, Daniel, Mitch."

The door shut and Daniel said, "I would say that is our cue to be gone in less than a few minutes." He looked at Mitch. "I mean it buddy. Go and get your coat."

"I have to go to the bathroom."

"Oh, really?" Daniel said. He clearly wasn't buying the delaying tactic.

"Dad, when a boy has to go, a boy has to go."

"Be quick about it," Daniel said. "And we'll be having a talk on the way home about being rude to people."

Mitch hopped off the stool and climbed the stairs. "So, naturally, he has to use the bathroom upstairs, the one farthest away," Daniel said, shaking his head. He looked at Sam. "That has to be one of the top ten most awkward moments of my life. I am really sorry, Sam."

He looked so overwhelmingly sad. It was beyond contrition for the awkward moment. Sam thought it was the burden he carried going from being a bachelor to the father of four children who were confused and hurting from the loss of just about everything except each other. Sam said very quietly, "There's nothing to be sorry about." She felt overwhelmed with tenderness for him, her dear friend with his big heart who couldn't turn away the children when they had nowhere else to go.

Without making a conscious decision, she kissed him. It was meant to just be a gentle brushing of the lips, a comforting kiss of long time friends, not cheating on Jack. His lips were warm and she lingered there a moment longer than intended. His lips parted and the kiss started to become real. Hers parted in answer and for a few precious moments, they were sharing their first real kiss. Their tongues slid over each other and at that precise moment, they heard the toilet flush. They broke apart and stared at each other. Sam's hand went to her mouth. She couldn't believe the red hot tide of desire that was sweeping her. Kissing Daniel had been a revelation. She saw the lust in his eyes and knew that it had affected him too.

"Sam, I… I was way out of line. I'm sorry. I-" Daniel stammered.

Mindful that Mitch was almost back, Sam just said, very softly. "I kissed you not the other way around. You have nothing for which to apologize but, obviously, we have something to think about." 

"I don't understand what just happened," he said. "Do you?"

She bit her lip. What HAD just happened? She didn't know but she did know that she had never cheated on a boy friend in her life and didn't want to start now. If she was with Jack and able to feel right here and now like she wanted to drag Daniel to the nearest bedroom, there was obviously something to think about.

"No," she responded, "but I think we need to."

When Jack returned fifteen minutes later, he found her with a Scotch, a totally uncharacteristic drink for her. He put the beer in the refrigerator and hung up his coat without saying a word to her. At last he came to her side and put his arms around her. He kissed her very thoroughly. Sam felt a little like he was marking territory. With his arms around her and his face buried in her neck, where she couldn't see it, he asked, "Are you happy Sam?" 


	2. Chapter 2

2006 – One year before Chapter 1

It was a regularly scheduled activation and the proper code had been transmitted. The guards on duty in the gateroom did not have their rifles at ready and, truth be told, weren't paying real attention except for one extremely nervous young soldier. He was new to the Mountain and this was the first time he had drawn this duty. He wasn't feeling very well and had heavily self-medicated. He felt more than a little woozy even with all that, or perhaps because of it. He simply did not want to have to stand down from this first opportunity to see the gate in action. In some secret corner of his heart, he was afraid the whole fantastical gate to the stars thing was a colossal joke on him along the lines of "See what we can get that dope Jones to believe." However, as the liquid silver of the event horizon formed inside the gate, he began to wish he had reported in sick. Just the previous week, SG-9 had literally rolled through the gate struggling with a superior mass of very nasty and wild tribesmen. In addition to the wounded on SG-9 itself, one of the soldiers in the gateroom detail had suffered a nasty knife wound.

At the precise moment the man and woman stepped onto the ramp, Jones was the only one looking directly at them. They were not in uniform—clearly not SG-14. They appeared fit and dangerous to him, in their black leather jackets, their eyes hidden by dark glasses. The imposing young man was actually dressed completely in black leather. All this black leather triggered some long conditioned response about black leather clothes equaling bikers and other dangerous people. He gasped out loud and was immediately embarrassed by this visible nervousness. He only had one brief second to think about that embarrassment because the young man reached around behind him and Jones just knew he was drawing a gun. While the other members of the detail were coming to attention and the sergeant was rapping out a request for the newcomers to identify themselves, Jones whipped his rifle up and fired. His target moved at that precise moment and that, coupled with an imperfect aim, resulted in the shot hitting the woman, not the man.

As she fell, two children emerged from the event horizon, stumbling over her prone body. "Mamma, mamma," the little girl cried out and stopped in her tracks.

Her slightly older brother, perhaps 7 or 8, said, "Jake, what's going on? What happened to Mama?" as he scrambled to her side. Jones had been grabbed and disarmed by three other soldiers while the rest kept their rifles trained on the family in disarray on the ramp. He could only watch in horror as events unfolded.

Two more people came through the gate and immediately bumped into those already there. The newest arrivals, a teen-aged girl and man in dark glasses and a cap, both cried out, the girl saying, "Oh my God, Mamma," and the man crying out in anguish, "Mandy, darling," as he dropped to her side, his head bowed over her.

The young man in black leather they were calling Jake was standing with his hands raised, stiff and angry, like an attack dog that wants to go for your throat, but is being held back by some thin restraint of training. Jones could now see he was little more than a teen for all his size and attitude. "Jake what's happened to her?" the older man asked.

She moaned, coughed, and said, weakly, "Danny, Danny." The man who Jones assumed was Danny tenderly removed her dark glasses and she caught his hand.

The sergeant studying the face of the woman lying on the ramp said, "You shot Colonel Carter." He turned to one of his men. "Get the medics in here."

The man on the ramp looked up at the sound of the Sergeant's voice. "What the hell is going on here? When did the SGC start shooting its own people? Where's General Hammond?"

The sergeant had moved a few steps closer with recognition dawning on his face. "I'm really sorry Dr. Jackson. This is terrible. The medics are on the way. Sir, I have to ask, who are all these people and what happened to SG-14? They were the ones whose code was transmitted."

"I have absolutely no idea what you are talking about Sergeant." Jackson stopped and looked around, really looked around, while the Sergeant really looked at him. They both became alarmed. "I don't know who you are," the Sergeant spoke first. "You aren't really Daniel Jackson are you?" As the woman's baseball cap slid off and long blonde hair cascaded out, he added, "And she isn't Colonel Carter."

The young soldier had never seen Colonel Carter before, but Dr. Jackson had been pointed out to him in the cafeteria a couple of days ago. This man wasn't wearing glasses and had longer hair. There was a old scar, thin and white through an eyebrow.

"I most certainly am Daniel Jackson and my wife is Samantha Carter but she has never been in the military," the man on the ramp said, "and this isn't the SGC."

The medics had arrived and efficiently lifted the wounded woman to a gurney. She never let go of the man's hand.

"I don't know what's going on, but you are going to have to come with me," the Sergeant said when the man and the rest of the family started to accompany the woman to the infirmary.

"You just SHOT my wife for no reason and you want to separate her from her husband and children at a time like this?" the man was livid. "I don't think so."

The Sergeant bit his lip. He looked up as another squad came pelting into the gateroom, sent by the observers up in the control room. He handed the gateroom duty over to them and signaled his squad to accompany the party going to the infirmary. All, that is, except Private Jones, and two soldiers who escorted him to the brig. He never saw the gate again.

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SG-1 came down the ramp to find a very wary squad on guard duty. The rifles remained pointed in their direction even after the soldiers had plenty of time to recognize them. "Sergeant Martin," Mitchell called out. "What's up? It's just us."

"Can you prove that?"

"Excuse me?" Mitchell said.

"Last week I ran into you outside the cafeteria and we spoke for a couple of minutes. Do you remember what the topic of conversation was?"

"You ARE serious. I hope we're not going to have to start telling you about how various baseball teams are doing this year, like the sentries made them do in World War II. I don't think there's one of us who's been planetside enough this season to follow the sport." It was apparent the Sergeant was getting impatient. Mitchell lifted a hand in surrender and said, "It was something to do with Girl Scout cookies. You said you had a sign up thing on your locker and asked me if I wanted any."

"Bingo," Martin said. "And you are sure that this is really Teal'c, Colonel Carter, and Dr. Jackson?"

"Yes," he said without hesitation.

"What the deuce is this about?" Sam asked.

"A Dr. Jackson and a Samantha Carter came through the gate with four children who are apparently theirs earlier this afternoon and some trigger happy kid shot the other Carter. She's in the infirmary in very critical condition. The rest of them are all down there with her."

Without any more conversation SG-1 immediately took off at a rapid clip for the infirmary. "Even if she hadn't been wounded, the effect of coexisting with me should be starting to affect her soon," Sam said.

Daniel spoke for the first time. "So you are assuming this is an alternate universe thing instead of clones or shape shifters or something?"

She blew out a long breath. "You're right. There are other possibilities."

Daniel added, "As further evidence against the alternate universe theory, remember in every single alternate universe we've been to, you're with Jack and not me.

Teal'c said, "Indeed." The inflection was so strange that Sam found herself thinking that there was some coded content to his comment, particularly when she noticed a quick exchange of glances between the two men.

The entrance to the infirmary was marked by a knot of armed personnel. They moved through them to emerge into the outer room of the infirmary. A man was sitting with his head down and his arms around a little girl around 6 and a little boy a couple of years older. Two teenagers, a girl with long blonde hair and a boy, almost a man, were sitting stony faced on either side of the younger children and glaring at General Landry out of blue eyes just like their father's.

"I know this is a difficult time for you, but we need to get a handle on what's going on. If you are from an alternate universe, you and your wife are going to start experiencing serious problems shortly," Landry was saying. He sounded impatient and Sam thought alternate Daniel had been difficult in some way.

Mitchell and Teal'c were slightly ahead of Sam and Daniel. Two soldiers were between Daniel and Sam and the little group in front of Landry. The little girl looked up and her eyes got wide. She jumped down off the chair and barreled at Mitchell, squealing, "Uncle Cam, Uncle Cam." She threw herself at him and he was compelled to scoop her up to keep them both from winding up on the floor. "Uncle Cam, it's terrible. These bad men shot Mamma."

Alternate Daniel looked up and saw Mitchell. An expression of relief immediately showed on his face. "Thank God," he said and smiled warmly. "Yours is the first familiar face I've seen in this place. They tell me Janet's dead. That's a world of hurt for all of us. I'm sorry man." Sam was struck by the fact that this Daniel had a Southern accent so close to Mitchell's that she couldn't tell the difference. He also didn't act like he knew Teal'c.

Teal'c said, "Is the evidence indicating an alternate reality?"

"I've allowed myself and my children to be poked and prodded sufficiently for them to establish that we are not androids or clones or shapeshifters," alternate Daniel said. "I'm very aware of the temporal distortion to which you refer. I figure we have about a day, correct, before it starts to be lethal?"

Daniel and Sam stepped forward into full view. The children stared. Alternate Daniel looked taken aback and then immediately fascinated. "Hey," he said and then "Wow. I've met myself in about five other alternate realities but it just never gets old."

Landry started to speak and alternate Daniel lifted a hand. "We used a quantum mirror on those occasions. Today we merely went through the gate as we have hundreds of times before. My family and I were coming back from our home at the Alpha site on Abydos to attend Mandy's brother's wedding, take in a couple of soccer games, and let the kids have a chance to see their grandparents and the rest of the family back in North Carolina." His face cleared. "There you go. Either you've got the quantum mirror or I can show you where to find it. As soon as Mandy's condition stabilizes, I can just use it to locate our reality and we go home."

Landry started to answer but Sam interrupted without thinking, "My parents are still alive in your reality?"

He looked at sympathetically. "No, I'm sorry. Mary and Jacob died before I met you." He stopped abruptly, chagrined. "I meant before I met Mandy. You are clearly not her. In any case, I'm talking about my mother and stepfather."

Landry cleared his throat. "Sorry, sir," Sam apologized quickly.

"I'm afraid there are problems with the mirror." Sam imagined Landry was thinking that this was classified information and he didn't trust the man in front of him.

"And you don't trust me enough to tell me about them," alternate Daniel finished.

"Let's just say, it's not available at the moment to address this problem."

"Cam," alternate Daniel said, "can you help out here?" He took in the expression on Cam's face and threw up his hands. "That's right. You're not our Cameron Mitchell. Speaking of which, why don't you put my daughter down."

Cam complied and alternate Daniel said something to the little girl in another language. She looked upset and he repeated it again more forcefully.

"What was that?" Mitchell asked.

In a low voiced aside, Daniel said, "Egyptian the way it's spoken on Abydos. He's warning her that you aren't really her Uncle Cam and reminding her to be careful of strange men." Alternate Daniel wasn't paying attention to the conversation any more, his attention focused on Carolyn Lam as she emerged from the operating theater.

She looked at the tense family and said, very sadly, "We've done all we can, but we can't," she sighed and faltered. She'd told Sam once that telling people that the ones that they cared about weren't going to make it was the hardest part of her job. "We can't save her. She has very little time left. You need to say your good-byes." Sam felt a vise grab her insides. She had not even seen the woman so the fact that she was a version of herself was not real to her the way the duplication of Daniels was to Daniel standing beside her but it was still like hearing a death sentence for herself.

There were tears rolling down alternate Daniel's cheeks and the rest of the family except for Jake began to sob. Jake looked like he wanted to kill someone. His father dashed the tears away and said, very quietly, "We have to do this for your mother and we have to do it right. We want her to take the right memory of the last time she saw our faces to where she is going next." He looked at each of his children in turn, starting with the older two. "All right Jake? All right Mary Clare?" He leaned over to get more on a level with youngest. "All right Mitch? All right Catherine?"

The boy stopped crying, put his arm around his little sister, and said, "Come on Catherine. We can do it. She's going to go be with Jesus and the angels like Grandpa Mel and Grandpa Jacob, just like Miss Alice always says."

Alternate Daniel picked Catherine up and clapped a hand on Jake's shoulder, propelling him forward. Mary Clare took Mitch's hand and they went into the other room. Sam turned to General Landry. "Is there really a problem with the mirror? If we can't get that man back to where he belongs soon before temporal distortion gets serious, those kids are going to be orphans." 


	3. Chapter 3

2006

As soon as alternate Daniel and his family disappeared into the room with the dying Mandy, SG-1 heard Landry's explanation of the problems surrounding the quantum mirror. Landry had just learned that morning that it was missing. There were no clues as to who had taken it or why. It was not likely to be the way to save the couple from temporal distortion.

Carolyn, having overhead them, came closer and said quietly, "If she dies, there may not actually be a problem. Daniel's DNA changed slightly after each time he descended. He may be, in some cosmic sense, different enough that temporal distortion isn't a problem. Dr. Frasier learned what to look for with respect to the temporal distortion phenomena and, when I examined the other Daniel, I didn't see any sign of it."

Sam said, fervently, "We can only hope." Cam was having trouble himself with the situation. He could imagine how hard it would be for Sam to think of those children, in some sense her children, losing their other parent. She continued, "However, we can't be sure, right? If I might ask, General, who's working on the problem?" Landry filled her in and she left quickly to assist with the effort.

Landry said, "There's nothing to be gained by questioning the man any further at this point about how he got here. I think he's told us everything he knows. He's just lost his wife and his children, their mother. Mitchell, he seems to be comfortable with you. Please take charge of getting them settled in guest quarters, under guard of course, food, whatever they need. I putting them under your care until otherwise notified." Daniel seemed to be about to say something and the General said, "I think putting you in charge of yourself might be a strain on both of you." Daniel reluctantly nodded.

The family came closer to stumbling out than walking out. The little girl was sobbing noisily again and little Mitch was trying very hard not to cry himself, but to focus on her. Jake was as stony faced as ever. Mary Clare was buried against her father's shoulder, her visibly shaking shoulders evidence that she was weeping silently. Alternate Daniel was white-faced and drawn, but not crying. "She's gone," he said simply. He turned to the General. "Sir, is there a priest available? I'd like the appropriate rites."

Landry, nodded, not showing his probable surprise at this marked difference from the Daniel of this reality.

Cam said, gently, "Daniel, would you like to get out of here? Go to guest quarters and have an opportunity for some privacy?"

Alternate Daniel nodded. "Thanks. That would help." He smiled slightly and said, "It's Dan by the way. No one calls me Daniel, but my mother. You certainly never did."

They began to walk toward the guest quarters, Cam leading the way and Daniel accompanying them. Daniel spoke then, "Dan, I'm really sorry. When I lost Sha're, it was like falling into a black hole and she and I had just a short time together. You and your wife shared a life for a long time. Whatever I can do…"

Jake zoned in, surprising them, and said, "Sha're? The headman's daughter? I don't get it."

Daniel said, "We were married for three years before she died." His eyes widened. "She's well? She's still alive and okay in your reality?"

Jake said, "Alive, yeah. Okay? Let's just say, the woman is the biggest pain in the ass in the entire village. She's really down on the Tauri and certainly not a big fan of our family, particularly not of me. You really know how to pick 'em, don't you?"

Dan rebuked Jake sharply in the Abydos dialect. Daniel said something conciliatory in the same language which brought the other two up sharp. They were evidently used to using it as a secret language when they were back on Earth and hadn't considered that Daniel would know it.

"So," Dan said, "how did that happen, you and Sha're?" Mitchell thought, if he's like our Daniel, his curiosity works overtime and this is helping him to distract himself.

"When we got to Abydos, we were greeted as personages of great importance. They gave Sha're to me as a wife. Of course, we didn't…" Daniel fumbled for words, "It would have shamed her for me to openly reject her so we let the village think we were truly together, but after awhile we wanted to be."

Dan slanted a sidewise look at him. "I got cross-examined about whether I had a wife, which of course I did. Now, I see where I might have ended up." Jake snorted and Dan gave him a quelling look. "So, you two never had a child?"

"No," he said. Just no, but all of them had seen the intense pain on his face. Cam imagined he had felt again the pain of Sha're's child by Apothis, the bittersweet pleasure of the time when he had Sha're back for himself briefly in her late pregnancy, and then losing her again. Teal'c had told him the sad story to help him understand Daniel better.

When they reached the guest quarters, Daniel said, "I imagine you want to be alone as a family. I'll be by in the morning and, like I said, if there's anything I can do, let me know." Cam took his leave as well.

As he and Daniel walked away, he observed, "This might be the last night of the man's life. It seems so inadequate just walking away."

Daniel stopped and looked at Cam. "I was very struck by what Carolyn said. I think there's a good chance that he'll be okay."

Cam said, "Have you stopped to think about the implications of that? The man has nothing here. No savings, no possessions, no academic credentials. He won't be able to stay Dr. Daniel Jackson because we won't be able to explain two of you, identical in appearance, with the same name. It's a lot like the android Daniel, isn't it? Except this is a flesh and blood person whose rights simply can't be trampled on or ignored. I imagine there'll be strong pressure on him to pick another world. Then there are his kids. They have no identity here either and he has no resources to provide for them. Right now, he's just lost his wife. If he lives, he'll still die for all intents and purposes."

Cam continued to spend time with Dan and his family. It was a little like waiting for a bomb to go off although after the first 24 hours, every hour that passed without any sign of temporal distortion, he relaxed a little bit more. He had always admired Daniel, but he found that he instantly bonded with Dan. It was hard not to respond to Dan's easy friendship and he was fascinated by the stories Dan told him about the boyhood and teen years the two of them had shared in another reality. They were very close to what had actually happened to him. In some cases, the only difference was that Dan had not been present when he had lived it.

Dan asked him, "Cam, I need an orientation here. Tell me about this Daniel and your relationship to him."

Cam said, "That's pretty weird but okay. The guy is brilliant. He's got two Ph.D.s, one in linguistics and one in archeology, and multiple Masters. The last count I heard was that he spoke 23 languages but that was years ago. Who knows how many he's up to now? He figured out how to make the gate work. He's done all sorts of fantastic things and been a major force toward saving the planet more than once. He ascended once and was gone for a year before he chose to descend. The second time, he ascended part way, turned it down and came back." That got him an incredulous look. "Really. He did."

"Is there anything between him and Mandy, I mean, Sam?"

Cam said, "They've always been great friends, but, well, it was always Jack that had Sam's attention and now that he's been promoted and she's not really in his chain of command, they've finally done something about it."

Dan stopped and looked at him as if he had lost his mind. Then he smiled and started walking again. "Okay, you had me going for a moment. That's worth at least a Wookie, but not Chewbacca. Now what's the truth?"

Mitchell gaped at him. When he had been a kid and his friends had been in their intense Star Wars phase, they had actually gone through a period of using their Star Wars figures as measures of value.

"We were really good friends growing up," he said.

"The best," Dan affirmed. "Why do you think my youngest son is named Mitchell? And you and Janet were going to," he clenched his teeth and stopped.

"I'll tell you about Daniel's love life if you'll finish that sentence."

"It's just hard. Janet's not dead. The two of you have been married a little over a year. Janet's seven months pregnant. It's a girl and you've, or rather they've, already decided she will be named Danielle. Now I'll never see the kid."

Cam hated to see what this man was going through. He said more heartily than he felt, trying to get to a lighter vein, "Sam really is with Jack."

"That's preposterous!" Dan exploded. "She doesn't look much like my Mandy, way too uptight and military, but she can't be that different. Like my British friends say, they're chalk and cheese. Jack O'Neill's a great guy and he came through for Abydos on our first mission together, but he's just NOT up to Mandy-ur-Sam's fighting weight intellectually. He'd bore her to death and she'd annoy the hell of him. And that's just the beginning." He chewed on it for a moment. "Nothing with Daniel. So who is he with?"

"There hasn't really been anyone since Sha're. He mainly seems to draw alien babes for whatever reason. There have been quite a few really interested in him, Vala Mal Doran being the latest, but he's still a geek at heart I guess and just seems a little clueless when it comes to female interest on earth." Cam considered, thought about telling Dan that he thought Daniel might care more for Sam than anyone realized, but decided that was only a wild suspicion on his part, devoid of anything but a gut feeling.

Mercifully, the children hadn't heard about temporal distortion and didn't realize that their remaining parent was on a potential death watch. Cam enjoyed the two little ones and within a few days, they had forgotten that he was not the same man they had always known. Jake was less willing to make the substitution, but Cam found that they were able to come to their own accord. The one he couldn't figure out was Mary Clare. She was a winsome girl, quietly vibrant, with the kind of looks that would grow into great beauty by the time she was fully mature. He found her refreshing and regretted the fact that as soon as she knew he was there she got extremely shy. He was shocked when Jake told him quietly, "She has a huge crush on the original Uncle Cam but she was comfortable with him because she had always known him. He just teased her and had a way of making light of the crush without making light of her that kept it all defused. It's a little different with you." The days went by and nothing happened except that Daniel's family began to get cabin fever and Cam became more and more certain that he really needed to introduce Mary Clare to some attractive boys her own age.

SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS

Jack came for the weekend but he didn't come to the Mountain. He and Sam sat in front of a roaring fire at her house and it seemed there was nothing to say. He just stared into the flames and responded to her conversational sallies with monosyllables. Finally she said, "Jack I really don't want a relationship with a statue."

He leaned over and pulled her to him and started kissing her but she pushed him away. "What's your problem? I didn't think statues made out," he said.

"My problem is that every time something is going on the answer is not to shut me up with sex. What is it!" She couldn't stop her voice from rising.

"These kids," he asked, turning the beer bottle in his hands and not looking at her, "they look like you or do they look like Daniel?"

"Mary Clare looks a lot like me at that age and little Mitch looks just like Daniel. The other two, though, are sort of a mixture. They have Daniel's light brown hair and their eyes are more his shade of blue than mine, I think they have his mouth too, but still I think they look more like me. Well, except Jake's got Daniel's body proportions I think although he's a lot more muscular than Daniel probably was at that age."

"You certainly have studied Danny's body parts," Jack said sarcastically.

"What's that supposed to mean?" Sam asked.

"I'm just saying, for all intents and purposes these kids are yours and Daniel's even though there's never been anything physical between you." He looked at her through narrowed eyes. "There hasn't, has there?"

"Jack, have you lost it?" she blew up, losing her cool. "So there's one alternate reality where I'm with Daniel. In all the others I'm with you including this one. You're acting like you just found out that I had Daniel's love child. I feel like the cover of the National Inquirer."

He raised a hand. "Okay, I'm sorry. I just can't help but wonder what goes through your head when you look at those kids."

"Nothing Jack except feeling exceptionally sorry that they have lost everything but their father and they may be about to lose him too. Why do you think I've been working so hard to try to figure out how the gate sent them here and what can be done to reverse it?"

Jack looked at her a moment longer and then shifted to face back to the television set. "I think what we need is a good hockey game. Don't you?"

SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS

After about two weeks, Dan asked for some work, some translations, something to keep busy. Landry directed that he be given something with no weapons implications, no real classified content other than the fact that it was from off world, something Dan obviously already knew. It turned out that Dan was, like Daniel, a linguist and an archeologist. Daniel sat down with him to orient him and determine the background he brought to the task.

"So where did you study?" Daniel asked.

"I got both doctorates from the University of Chicago like you." Daniel looked a question. "I asked Cam for your curriculum vitae. It's a matter of public record after all," Dan said, just a little defensively. "I don't have any masters in other fields. Mandy and I got married before I finished the second Ph.D. There wasn't time for collecting degrees with Mary Clare and Jake being born 10 months after we got married."

He grimaced ruefully. "I make this sound like a competition, don't I and I have to explain why I'm on the losing team? Too many years of competitive soccer, I guess. Anyway, after the accident in the museum when I was young that killed my father-our father-, Mom was determined that I should have a stable life. She accepted a faculty position at Duke in Chapel Hill, N.C. and tried to see that I had a typical childhood. After she remarried, things got even more relentlessly normal. I was only ahead of myself in school a year up until college. Of course I did a lot of independent study with her and I got through undergraduate in two years, but in grade school and high school, I was really good at faking being one of the guys. Cam was the only one of my friends who really knew all the stuff I had going on. I guess all that blending in was why I only shared my rogue research conclusions about the pyramids with Catherine. Lucky for me, she was the one who got involved with the Stargate and really the only one who needed to know." He laughed. "That was a lot more than you asked. I'm sorry. I do tend to run on."

Daniel laughed in response, "And I don't? Just ask Sam."

Dan looked down for a moment and Daniel apologized. "I shouldn't have mentioned her."

"Hey, she's here, right? I notice she's staying away from me and I appreciate that. I'm not ready to see Mandy sort of," he grimaced, "okay, I'll say this to you. If I can't be honest with almost myself… Thing is you need to understand me but no one else, except maybe Cam, needs to hear this."

Daniel said, "It's really hard for you not to act like Cam's your life long friend, isn't it?"

Dan said, "Yeah. I keep trying to remember, but there he is, looking and sounding exactly the same. I'm glad he seems to have bonded with the little ones because emotionally if their favorite uncle rejected them, I think it would really hurt. That's the thing with your Sam. She looks a lot less like Mandy than Cam does like, well Cam. It's more than the short hair and the uniform. If I had to describe Mandy, after her brilliance, what you noticed was that she was unconventional, hated rules, hated conformity. Her father died in Nam and her mother died when she was about 10. She and her brother went through a series of foster homes, mostly separated. She got very rebellious, kind of wild."

Daniel said, "My curriculum vitae didn't tell you that the accident killed both my parents, Grandfather Nick didn't want me, and I grew up in foster homes."

Dan looked at him stunned. Then he nodded slowly, "So maybe you can understand how different that would make my Mandy. And frankly, watching your Sam walk around all military and cool seems like a perversion of something. I keep finding myself reacting to it as wrongness. It's not at all fair to her or even rational, but it makes me mad that she's alive and Mandy's dead. The little ones I think will have a harder time separating her from their mother and it will only confuse and hurt them when she really can't fill the role. I think we need to go to the Alpha site or I've heard talk about Atlantis."

Daniel said, "Problem is, we haven't developed sites as total colonies with families the way your reality has. There wouldn't be anywhere for you to go where there would be a structure for your kids." They looked at each other glumly and let it drop. Neither of them could see a solution.

At the end of a month, Carolyn was sure that Dan wasn't going to self-destruct and Sam and her team had found no way to return him and his family to their own reality. It was time to face up to the challenge of making a life for himself and his family in a world where he had no home, no savings, and no pension. He and his family had no identification or no record that they existed. All their friends and relatives were gone. The wounds were too deep for the SGC's psychologist, but he tried anyway. Dan turned to the priest who was a chaplain at the Mountain and seemed to get more from those conversations than session with the psychologist.

Landry sat down with Daniel, Cam, and Dan to talk about it. "We've thought about sending you off world and if it weren't for your kids, that would unquestionably be the solution. They will pay a price whether you go to the Alpha site or Atlantis or settle on one of the worlds of our allies. The price they pay if you stay here is that they will have to accept new identities. The little ones will have to stay in the Mountain for quite awhile until we're sure they have completely mastered the new story. We won't be able to give you academic credentials that would really work for the kind of research career for which you are suited. The first time you published anything, it would be immediately apparent you hadn't attended wherever you claimed to have gone. Your only option if you want to continue with the work for which you are trained and stay on this planet, is to work for us."

Dan shrugged. "Nothing you've said is a surprise. Let me think about it. Talk to the older two at any rate."

Before they reconvened, everything changed. Daniel was in his office and looked up to see Dan at the door. His face was drawn and he moved almost like a zombie. "Can I come in?" he asked, his face and his manner devoid of any animation.

"Sure," Daniel said. "Please sit down."

Dan dropped into the indicated chair like a felled steer and sat staring at his hand for awhile. Finally he looked up and said, "I've just spoken with Dr. Lam. She's found signs that temporal distortion is affecting me after all. She projects I have maybe six months."

Daniel felt a wave of nausea sweep over him. Despite the fact that Dan had lost everything worldly, in addition to his wife, Daniel had felt guilty twinges of jealousy several times. Dan had had the childhood he had wanted, a long standing marriage, children, a professional career devoid of criticism, and was relaxed and confidant in a way Daniel would never be. He felt as if he had willed this terrible thing on Dan at some level. "No," he said. "I can't accept that."

"It's still going to happen," Dan said. "I have something huge I have to ask you."

Daniel felt a second, even more powerful wave assail him. "You want me to be a father to your kids."

He didn't pose it as a question. Dan knew Daniel understood just as Dan knew that Daniel would have done the same thing had the positions been reversed. "Will you consider it?"

What could Daniel say? The man was dying because Daniel lived. "I'll consider it. Perhaps I should spend some time with them. Let us all make an informed decision."

Dan said, "That's all I ask."

Daniel sat in his office for a long time after Dan left, thinking about the request. He realized that this would change things between Sam and himself. Things were already strained because of her affair with Jack. He had been surprised at how much that bothered him and he didn't really want to think about why it did. How much more strain would it cause to have children walking around that were living proof of what might have happened between them, but never had?


	4. Chapter 4

2006

Daniel had spent time with Dan prior to this, but relatively little time with his family. They set about immediately changing that. He and Cam had lunch the next day in the cafeteria with the entire family. As soon as they all sat down, Jake said, "This makes me feel like I'm in a jisex freak show." Mitch sniggered.

Daniel looked at Dan, who said, in Abydos Egyptian, "Language, Jake." Jake rolled his eyes. Dan said, "Cussing is still cussing whether the people around you understand it or not."

The profanity issue settled, Daniel looked around and indeed half the people in the cafeteria were staring at them. The other half were studiously not staring at them which amounted to the same thing. Little Mitch looked up at his brother and said, "We're freaks in a good way, Jake. It's okay."

Jake scowled and Catherine said, "What's a freak, Daddy?"

Dan said, "Someone who scares someone else just by being different."

Mary Clare who had been bickering with her twin brother since they had entered the dining area said, "Like Jake."

Daniel tried to defuse the situation by asking Mary Clare, "What are you interested in with your studies?"

"When I can stop?" she asked. The answer was flip, but she smiled when she said it. He was intrigued to notice that when she caught Cam out of the corner of her eye also smiling at the remark, she blushed fiery red and suddenly seemed to find her napkin very interesting. She's got a crush on Cam, he thought. One more thing I'm going to have to learn how to be a parent about.

"Don't ask me," Jake said, putting up a hand.

Mitch said, "Jake is really good at languages. Dad teaches us languages like a game and Jake's the best."

Jake scowled but Daniel could see that it was half-hearted and, in fact, he was touched by a trace of hero worship from his little brother.

"So how many languages do you know, Mitch?" Daniel asked.

The little boy cocked his head thoughtfully. "English, Abydos talk, Jaffa, Spanish, and French. I know words in others but those are the ones I can do well." Daniel switched to Egyptian as spoken on Abydos and the others smiled to be talking in the language of their lost home except for Jake. His face closed up and he fell silent.

As they were leaving the cafeteria, Catherine pulled at his hand and got him to bend over so that she could whisper. "Abydos talk is even harder for Jake because he can't ever see Lila again."

"Who's Lila?" Daniel whispered back.

"She's Ms Sha're's daughter," Catherine said. Once again, Daniel was assailed by the totality of this family's loss. They couldn't get back to their Abydos and there was none left in this reality to even visit.

When he got together with Dan and his kids for the third day in a row, he noticed that Jake was watching him and Dan closely as if he was trying to catch them at something. At last, he asked Daniel if he would play some one on one with him. Daniel and Dan exchanged a glance. Both thought it odd, but, given their hidden agenda, it seemed like a good idea. Daniel was amazed by Jake's fluid grace. He hadn't moved like that as a boy. They had only played for five minutes or so when Jake stopped, wrapped his arms around the ball, and said, "I didn't really come here to play ball."

Daniel smiled. "I suspected as much. What's on your mind?"

"My dad's dying, right?"

Daniel was stunned. Was this a lucky guess or was Jake the logical product of two brilliant parents? "What are you talking about?"

"All of a sudden you're into all this togetherness with us. I have to wonder why. Dad and I came here yesterday and he was slower. His aim was off. He had lasick surgery years ago and he's got 20-20 vision, but it seemed to be blurry. You look at each other sometimes like there's a big secret."

"Jake, if there is something going on with your father, it would be for him to tell you, not me."

Jake clenched his teeth together so tightly that a muscle twitched in his jaw. "Know this. You may be the same guy as far as the cosmos is concerned, but as far as I'm concerned, you aren't half the man. Don't go giving yourself delusions that you could ever take his place."

He thrust the ball at Daniel and walked from the gym, pain in every step.

"Dan," Daniel said a day later, "Jake's got it figured out."

Dan who had been shoving bits of an artifact around on a work table, trying to get a start on figuring out what it had once been, just kept moving the chunks of ceramic. He sighed. "Yeah. After he came back from basketball with you, he had a million questions. I put him off, but he'll ask them again."

"How about Mary Clare? She seems just as bright as Jake."

"She is. But she is into denial. That's how she deals with things she doesn't like. Even if Jake talks to her about his suspicions, she won't want to hear it. I'd actually be more concerned about Mitch."

Daniel rubbed his chin. "I think you're right. He's the brightest of them all, isn't he?"

"Hard to tell. Intelligence is such a mosaic, right? Mandy was so creative. She made incredible, intuitive leaps. Mary Clare's just like her." He fell silent thinking about his lost wife. "Jake's much more likely to drive down a very methodical, analytic path. It's hard to tell about Catherine, although I think she may be an artist, not a scientist. She is so interested in everything she sees, so open-minded, that I think she has trouble deciding there is only one truth. The thing about Mitch is he's flat out precocious. He was born, it seems middle aged. He wants to take responsibility for everyone else." He looked at Daniel intently. "You'll have to watch out for that."

Every time Dan gave him one of these little tips, it made him wince. Every day it was something. He knew about their allergies-they all had them, Catherine the worst--, whether they had nightmares, their favorite foods, which ones would come to him if they needed help and which ones would try to tough it out.

"So, are you going to tell them?"

"What would be the point? Jake already has it figured out, Mary Clare doesn't want to know, and the little ones are better off not knowing for awhile. I'll tell them when I can't hide my problems any more. I figure about another two months."

SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS

Daniel went on one last mission with SG-1. He had requested a reassignment to planetside duties so that he wouldn't be away from the children. P2H890 was one of the most beautiful planets they had ever visited. There were huge fragrant flowers everywhere in a riot of color and the ground was covered with a creeping herb that released a marvelous odor when crushed underfoot. Birds with brilliant plumage wheeled above them and there wasn't anything hostile in sight. The planet's handsome people were tall and healthy and laughed readily. They welcomed SG-1 with open arms and immediately threw a party replete with delicious fruity things to drink and graceful dancers. Daniel sat companionably with Sam and watched the swirling bodies and trailing scarves. "It's like some sort of fantasy," he said, bemused.

"Can you really walk away from this?" Sam asked. Deep inside she knew she was really asking, can you walk away from me?

"I'll miss it although I do remember an awful lot of planets with ugly, unfriendly people, slimy, unpleasant vegetation, and downright scary animals. That's when we weren't up to our armpits in mud and slapping stinging insects off."

She laughed. "You do know how to bring up the good times."

"They were often deeply satisfying times, Sam, even when they weren't much fun."

They lapsed into silence. Sam almost thought Daniel was falling asleep when he suddenly said, "I don't have any choice Sam."

"I feel really guilty," Sam said. "I have the same connection to them that you do and I've barely seen them."

"Jack could never accept them Sam."

She didn't say anything at first and then she blurted out, "We've had fights about it already."

"We each have to do what we have to do," Daniel said and got up abruptly and walked to the other side of the fire where Teal'c had established himself with a circle of little children.

SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS

At the end of two months, Dan was having some obvious problems. His vision was frequently blurry and he had bouts of dizziness. Carolyn revised her estimate of how much longer he had and he decided that he needed to tell his children. He asked Cam and Daniel to be there. Dan had arranged a picnic on the surface. They were no longer under guard and Daniel went out and got some really good barbeque as well as some Indian food for the vegetarian Mary Clare rather than rely on the cafeteria to find some hitherto unseen spark of culinary excellence. It was a beautiful spring day. Looking around at the tulips poking up in the landscaped beds and the leaves beginning to bud on the trees, it seemed obscene to be talking about the end of life. They had demolished the food and were sitting comfortably around the picnic table in a small recreational area, when Dan stopped the three separate conversations that were going on to say, "There's a problem with going to another reality like we've done that I need to talk with you about. You remember that this is an alternate reality to our own?"

This question was for the benefit of the little ones. "If you never existed in the new reality, you're okay, but if you did exist there already, it's bad for you." Daniel noticed that he didn't mention that this was only if the other you was still alive. Dan was trying to minimize the choice the laws of physics were making between himself and Daniel.

Jake looked sad but unsurprised. Mary Clare was angry and Catherine was still not getting it. "Explain 'bad for you', Dad," Mitch said.

Dan smiled at the boy. "In about two or three months, I'll have to go and be with your mother."

Mary Clare looked angrily at Jake. "I bet you feel awfully smart."

"Mary Clare,. "Don't die, Daddy. Please. Can't you 'cend like Daniel did?"

She had evidently been paying more attention than they realized. Daniel was surprised by Dan's answer. "If I ascended, an option I don't think I have, I wouldn't be with you either, honey. I'm not afraid at all to die. I just don't want to leave you. I believe in Heaven and I believe your mother is there. I don't understand trying so hard to avoid death that you lose your capacity to love and be involved with the universe as the Ascended do. Why be a quasi-God when you can be with the real one?" taking cheap shots at your brother isn't going to make any of us feel better."

Catherine was looking at her father, her mouth working. Suddenly she flung herself at him His expression changed. Perhaps he realized he was talking more to Daniel, Cam, and himself, than the weeping little girl. He held out his arms to the other children and they came together, clinging to each other and to their father. The crying and holding on continued for a long time. Cam and Daniel sat uncomfortably, Daniel was fighting tears, feeling useless and so sad. He thought Cam looked like he was feeling the same way.

Eventually, Mary Clare and Jake took their seats again. Catherine sat on Dan's lap and Mitch sat leaning against him. Mitch anticipated his father again by asking, "What will happen to us, Dad?"

Dan said, "Daniel would like to have you live with him and be his family and Cam would like to be your honorary uncle."

Daniel heard his cue and said, "I know that I'm not your father. Everyone one of us makes a different place in people's lives. I would be very honored if you would allow me to occupy the place of someone who looks out for you and loves you as parent does."

Mitch said, "We would be helping you, wouldn't we? You don't have any children or any family at all." He looked at Catherine. "He's a nice man. He needs children so he won't be alone. Do you think we could help him?" She looked at her brother and her chin quivered. It was too soon for her to be so brave.

Jake said, "You know how I feel about it. I am, however, a realist. Even after I turn 18 next months, I'm a stranger in a strange land here. I appreciate your help as long as you understand the boundaries."

Mary Clare said, "This conversation has got to stop now. Dad's not dead. Maybe he won't die. Doctors have been wrong before. I don't want to hear it."

By the end of another month, Dan was bedridden. He drifted in and out of lucidity. When he was himself, it was clear that he was coming closer and closer to peace with the situation. Toward the end, Daniel felt almost as if Dan had already ascended but managed to keep his human body. His eyes were fixed on what was to come and he gently nudged his children to accept Daniel.

SSSSSSSSSSSSSs

Sam was surprised when Dan asked to see her. Daniel was sitting with him when she arrived. He smiled at her, but got up to leave. Dan said, "Please, Daniel, I'd like you to stay."

Sam looked at him. Where he had once looked so like Daniel, he was now tragically altered. He was gaunt and his eyes were sunken. There were pain lines etched deep in his face. He beckoned to Daniel. "If you could help me sit up a bit."

Daniel quickly stepped to his side and helped him maneuver into more of a sitting position in the hospital bed. Sam saw the mutual affection that had grown between the two men. She thought Dan must be as amazing as Daniel if it didn't evoke painful jealousy to be daily reminded of that what he had once been when he was healthy. Daniel was the before to his after and his very existence was the reason Dan was dying, yet Dan bore him no rancor. 

"How are you feeling?" she asked. It was an idiotic question but sitting by the bedsides of people she loved and watching them die hadn't taught her anything worth asking. It was really more about just showing up.

"There's a lot of pain but it's becoming less important. Come closer, will you?" He took her hand. His was thin and the skin was papery and dry. "I wanted to ask your forgiveness."

"My forgiveness?" she said, baffled. She'd had too little contact with him for there to be anything to forgive. "Rather I should be asking yours. I want to know that I tried very hard to find a way to return you to your own reality."

"It was very good of you and it makes it even more important that I say this. I loved Mandy from the day I met her on campus, trying to get signatures on some petition to do with the environment. For a long time, I've held it against you in my heart of hearts that you lived while she was dead. I held my children back from you. It was wrong. Will you forgive me?"

Tears had begun to slip down her cheeks. "Of course," she said. "Of course."

"Please search your heart, Samantha, and be open to what it tells you about my children, Daniel's children. If there's love there, they will need it."

SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS

Dan requested last rites and then he asked to be taken back up to the surface. On a clear June day with the sun high in the sky, he said good bye to each of his children. He took Cam and Daniel's hands and said, "Thank you. I'll pray for you." They stepped back and his children crowded in around where he lay in sort of deck chair, covered with a blanket. There was no IV pole. He'd refused that for this final moment. He smiled at them one last time, a most beatific, peaceful smile, closed his eyes, and slipped into a coma. He died two days later, racked by the waves of shimmering distortion that had immediately characterized temporal distortion when observed in others, without ever regaining consciousness. Daniel felt that somehow Dan had already left his body there on the grass, under the Colorado sunshine and all the rest was merely cosmic bookkeeping.

There was a Catholic funeral Mass. Daniel sat at one end of the pew and Cam at the other, the children in between. There were several others from the Mountain present. Dan had made a big impression on a number of people in the short time he had been among them. Daniel noticed Jack seated with Sam back a few rows. Sam was trying very hard not to cry, but there were tear tracks on her face. They went from the church to the graveyard. The two little ones held hands with each other between their older brother and sister. The family stood in a straight line, a unit without Daniel, for one last time.

Daniel had already purchased a new house, picked out with the children and Dan. His old one was too small, but more than that, he wanted to live in a neighborhood where people would just assume these were his children, rather than subject them all to months of the third degree. The children's meager possessions were to one side of the foyer where a friend had brought them from the Mountain earlier in the day. They went quietly into the house and stood uncertainly in the foyer, as if waiting for a director to say, "Action" to start their new life. 

At last Mitch said, "Dad, Mamma, I know you can see us. We're glad you are here with us and we will never forget you." He went to Daniel and took his hand. "Dad Daniel, will you help me take my stuff up to my room and figure out where to put it?"

Daniel looked down at the child and he was so full of love, he could barely speak. He nodded and picked up Mitch's suitcase and box of accumulated toys. Mitch took his small backpack. They started up the stairs together. It would be uphill and he was loaded down, but as long as they were partners, he knew they could make it. 


	5. Chapter 5

Warning: not a good chapter for S/J fans

2007

"Are you happy, Sam?" Jack asked again. The question sparked by little Mitch's impassioned plea earlier in the day hung in the air.

Okay, Sam, she told herself. It's time to stop suppressing your feelings because he doesn't want to talk about them. "Not completely.""

He pulled back and looked her in the face. "You want to get married. That's it, isn't it?"

Sam thought, once again, Jack, you prove that nine-tenths of the time you are oblivious by choice. For a moment before she answered him, she thought about the kiss she and Daniel had just shared. It seemed more and more unreal. She couldn't possibly be feeling that way when she had never once looked at him sexually over all these years except for the brief moment when she met him and before she found out he was married. It must have just been the stress and the emotional confusion of her feelings for the little boy that was theirs, but not really. After all, she had spent a lot of time lately imaginging what it would have been like if she and Daniel had been together like Mandy and Dan. The children made the thought impossible to ignore. She was just confused. It would be way too complicated if there was anything more to it.

"Sam?" he said impatiently.

At last she answered, "You know I do."

"I've got this death sentence hanging over me. I can't saddle you with what that would mean."

"Jack, you've been tap dancing around getting married since well before you were diagnosed a couple of months ago. You have very early onset Parkinson's. Very early. It was sort of a fluke that it was even noticed or diagnosed at this point. People frequently go eight years or more from where you are before the symptoms are even particularly noticeable. Look at Michael J. Fox. It works as a reason for not wanting to have kids with me-at my age we'd probably have to adopt anyway-but it's just an excuse as far as marriage goes."

He released her and went to the refrigerator and got another beer. Sam couldn't believe it. "You're terminating the conversation just like that?"

"Ya betcha," he said.

She walked over and blocked his path. She just couldn't do it any more. "Either we get married or it's over. I'm tired of playing house."

"I don't like ultimatums, Carter," Jack said, slipping into general mode.

"And I don't like being treated like I was under your command instead of your partner."

He looked aside for a long moment. Still not looking at her, he said, "Sam, I can't face this thing alone. Please don't leave me."

She knew the cost that request would have been to him, but he still hadn't agreed to give her what she needed. "You want me to stay, but you're not willing to give an inch for me to do it."

He didn't say anything. "I don't know Jack. I'll always be here as your friend, but to keep going as a couple… I just don't know."

He turned and walked out of the room. As he was going through the door, he said, not even looking at her, "All right. You win. We get married."

Sam was left standing alone and empty. Not once when she had thought about her future and day dreamed about being with Jack had she ever imagined that his marriage proposal would be tossed off as he went out the door.

Evidently Jack had decided to drink his dinner because he said nothing about food. Sam didn't feel like cooking and she certainly didn't feel like celebrating. She actually thought for a moment of going to Daniel, but, then, she remembered that everything had changed with Daniel. He wasn't the best friend any more to whom she could pour out her heart, not about another man anyway. Finally she called in a pick up order, grabbed her coat and her keys, and paused in the doorway of the living room. "I'm going to go out and get us some dinner. I should be right back."

Jack looked up at her and, for just a moment, she thought he'd been sitting in there crying. That was clearly impossible, but something had been going on. She noticed that the beer he had carried in with him was sitting on the coffee table, still full. Jack said, "Sammy, it's snowing pretty heavily now. Let me be the one to brave the roads." Anticipating a feminist reaction to that statement, he said, "I know you could do it. You can do just about anything I can do except piss standing up. I'd just like to do something for you."

It was a sort of vague apology, Jack style, and she agreed and gave him the details of the order. He was gone a long time and she began to worry about the roads. If he was really upset, maybe his lack of concentration caused him to have an accident. She was sitting in front of the television when she heard the door open. Sam didn't even look up when he came into the room a few minutes later. She wasn't sure how she felt about him at the moment. All of the sudden, a huge bouquet of roses appeared in front of her. Jack said, "These don't begin to be as beautiful as you are."

Sam was still recovering from the shock of Jack bringing her flowers-this was only the second time she'd ever gotten anything of the kind from him-when he knelt in front of her and took her hands in his, still cold from the outside. "Sam, that was a piss poor excuse for a proposal, even for me."

She tried to make some sound, tried to stop him. Jack was so proud and had so much trouble talking about his feelings. She didn't want him to go down a path he would regret later. "Let me talk," he said. "I love you. You're more than just a security blanket because I'm afraid of facing this stuff alone. I love you. Will you marry me?"

She nodded, afraid to trust her voice. There was so much emotion rolling through her that she couldn't process it. The one thing she noticed was that she wasn't overcome by joy, what she would have expected all those years she waited for this.

The next morning, she was sitting in her office, with papers spread out in front of her and a screen full of data on her computer. She had given up pretending that she was able to focus on anything she was looking at. Sam wished she had a ring because everything seemed completely unreal. They were going to go pick out a ring the next weekend when Jack was back again from DC. If she could look at her hand and see a stone, she could believe that it had happened. She couldn't kid herself though that this was the reason she wasn't positively giddy. She hadn't been giddy last night either.

There was a knock on her door and Daniel stuck his head in. Suddenly, she was very glad she didn't have a ring yet. How was she going to tell him what she had done? He looked at her questioningly and she said, "Hey. Come on in. I was just woolgathering big time."

He bit his lip, looked at her for a moment, and then closed the door behind him and locked it. She raised an eyebrow. "Sam, this is probably not the place to talk about… well, Sunday and maybe I'm forcing things, but I've been sitting in my office for two solid hours and I have made zero progress. The thing I'm working on could be really important…" His voice trailed off and he sighed. He started to make a circuit of the room, looking at the various things she had framed and hanging on the wall, all things he had seen before. With his back to her, he said, "I can't think about anything but you. I need to know where you're coming from."

Sam felt ill. She'd kissed him yesterday and gotten engaged to a man that had been a very close friend of his for a long time just hours later. She could not tell him about this to his back. She got out of her chair and crossed the room to him. He still had his back to her. She put a hand on his shoulder and he turned. Suddenly they were just inches apart. She started to take a step back but he reached out and took hold of her arms. She met his eyes. He wasn't wearing glasses. Somehow that irrelevant detail seemed very important. He hadn't been wearing them yesterday either or Friday in her office. She tried to focus on puzzling that out to keep the other thoughts that were flooding her mind at bay. It was a losing battle. His eyes are so beautiful, she thought. Why haven't I noticed that before? She was staring at him transfixed, like a deer in the headlights. Her eyes fell slightly to his mouth. She unconsciously dragged her teeth across her lower lip. He made a strangled sound and raised one hand to cup her face. "You're going to have to quit doing that with your mouth," he said in a husky voice.

The word mouth sent shivers through her. Her reaction must have showed in her eyes because he suddenly took possession of her mouth. The kiss was instantly very intimate. His arm tightened around her and his fingers burrowed into the hair at the back of her head and held her head to him. She grabbed a handful of his shirt and her other hand slipped around his waist and then lower, pulling them even closer together. It was a long kiss. It only ended when someone knocked at the door. Sam looked into his eyes. There was no way she was going to answer that knock.

He went to kiss her again and she shook her head slightly. "We have to stop." She didn't know where she got the self-discipline to say those words and she hadn't stopped holding him.

He nodded. "You are right. We should understand what we are doing before we do anything." He drew her into a hug, kissed her hair, and let her go. She felt bereft. It was crystal clear that she had told herself a huge lie yesterday. It had been so much easier to keep things uncomplicated, to stay the course she had set years before, the Sam and Jack course. She hadn't wanted to believe what she was feeling. Now, she couldn't deny it. Despite the impossible nature of the situation, she wanted Daniel more than she had ever wanted anyone in her life.

Daniel sat in her guest chair and she slowly retook her position behind the desk. "Here's the thing Sam. We've had everything a couple would want in every respect except the physical dimension for years. It hasn't been as good lately because other people, my children and Jack, have gotten in the way, but the fact remains we are extremely compatible. There just wasn't a mutual spark." He leaned forward across her desk and took her hands and kissed one palm. "There sure as hell is now."

"It's such a mess," Sam said.

"Really?" he said. There was hurt in his voice.

"Daniel, I'm with Jack. I'd have to end that before I can be with you. I'm not a cheat and neither are you."

He rubbed his face. "I know. That will be hard."

She noticed the use of "will". He had no doubt she was going to leave Jack for him. If only this had happened three months ago, before Jack got sick, before she accepted Jack's proposal. "Daniel, it's complicated." Jack had sworn her to secrecy repeatedly about his illness. He couldn't bear the thought of people knowing he was weak in any way.

"Complicated. That's a euphemism for something. What aren't you telling me?"

She looked aside. He stood, leaned over the desk, and captured her chin, forcing her head up. "I'm taking a huge risk here with my feelings, but I have to tell you. I'm in love with you. That's what I've been sitting in my office thinking about all morning."

She thought about lying to him. If she just told him she didn't feel the same way, he would be terribly hurt but he would go away. Looking into the beauty of those blue eyes, the internal beauty of Daniel's soul, she couldn't lie to him. "I never realized it before, but yes, I'm in love with you."

He leaned over and kissed her again. This wasn't passionate. It was tender and cherishing. He sat back down and beamed at her, but then his face changed when he realized that she didn't have a corresponding glow.

"Daniel, I don't know if I can leave Jack."

"What?"

"I can't talk about it. I promised. It's … this is hard… He asked me to marry him yesterday after you left and I accepted."

He groaned. "That makes it a bit harder, doesn't it?"

"Daniel, I love you." She noticed it was easier to say the second time. "I still love Jack, though. I've loved him for a long time. I can't hurt him, not now. This would be a very bad time right now."

Daniel narrowed his eyes and studied her. "What's so special about right now?"

Sam felt so helpless. "Daniel, I can't explain. If you love me, you have to trust me, right? I have to find a way out of this that won't leave Jack devastated."

"What the hell would that be?" He looked at her a little disgusted. "Sam, there is no easy way to lose someone you love. Believe me, I've had my share of loss and I know."

"I don't know, Daniel. I just know that I can't go to him right now and say 'it's over' particularly when it will be immediately obvious that it's over because I'm with you. He is SO jealous of you because we have the kids together, in some sense anyway."

"So what's your plan?" He crossed his arms across his chest. "You stay with him hoping that something magical will happen. Let me ask you this? Are you sleeping with him while you're staying with him?"

Sam felt a new wave of nausea assail her. How could she have sex with one man while thinking about another one? Hadn't she already done that last night? Hadn't she been thinking about Daniel while she was kissing Jack and comparing their kisses with the magic of the one kiss she and Daniel had had? She looked at Daniel, stricken. "Oh my God," she said without being able to stop herself. All the things the nuns had taught her came to her mind. The sense of wrongness she had been feeling about her affair with Jack magnified.

Daniel immediately became contrite looking at her white face. He got up, came around the desk, and pulled her up into his arms. He held her gently, rubbing her back, rocking her slightly. "I'm sorry, Sam. I do trust you and if you feel like there's some reason it's very hard to hurt Jack right now, I believe there must be a good one. I love Jack too. For a long time, he was like a combination older brother and best friend, something I never had before. Then he got increasingly distant and that hurt. The last two or three years I haven't felt that much of a connection with him, but he's never stopped being important to me."

She drew back and looked in his face, touched his cheek gently with her fingers. "Then you'll give me space, let me try to figure this out?"

He grimaced but then nodded. "We've got to avoid being alone like this. I don't know if I can keep my hands off you and, until you break it off with Jack, it would be wrong for us to do what every fiber of my body wants to do."

She laughed shakily. "I agree. I already feel guilty enough about whatwe've done so far."

He left and she resumed her position of fruitless endeavor from before. If Daniel had come to see her to help solve his inability to concentrate, the end result had been that neither of them were probably going to be worth a plugged nickel to the SGC for some time. 


	6. Chapter 6

2007

Although SG-1 had added another team member, they hadn't replaced Daniel. That was impossible and everyone, including the new guy, knew it. Occasionally Daniel would join a SG-1 meeting where his particular expertise was useful. Seeing him in those meetings or in the cafeteria was heaven and hell for Sam once they had declared their mutual love. While it was good to just be able to look at him, Sam had to fight to keep her face schooled in appropriate lines. She could not allow the desire that now flooded her at the sight of him show in her eyes nor sit with her gaze focused on his mouth while she thought of all the things he could do with it, if only she could give him the right. They didn't dare actually be alone together in a private setting where all those thoughts could turn into actions of which they would be ashamed.

General Landry was a shrewd man, but she didn't think he had any idea that there was a reason for suspicion. He and Jack had been friends since their days at the Academy and, in his mind, she belonged to Jack. Cam was the one she worried about. He was really good with people and he noticed things. She feared he would have very mixed emotions about her interest in Daniel. She caught him more than once looking at her speculatively and she wondered if Daniel would confide in him sooner or later. The two men were so close now, Cam's bond with Dan having transferred itself to Daniel. Cam spent a lion's share of his free time with Daniel and his kids and, she thought, his first reaction would be to protect Daniel against being hurt. She doubted that this would translate into supporting Daniel's involvement with her since to any impartial observer, she would look like a train wreck waiting to happen.

Jack had taken to calling her every night but the calls were short. Jack was a man of few words and talking on the phone was not his idea of fun. She personally thought it was his way of marking territory, of reminding her daily that there was a leash and it was a short one.

The self control and focus on discretion she and Daniel shared meant that phone calls were the only recourse left to her. After Jack called, she would call Daniel. This way there was no danger that Jack would be unable to get through and get worried or suspicious. It made her feel rotten to be deceiving Jack in such a calculated manner, but she kept telling herself that she wasn't actually doing anything and that the alternative was to break it off with Jack completely which would have been much harder on him. The phone calls with Daniel had progressed to include some mild but explicit remarks. This actually made things even harder when they saw each other in person. The intimate things they had said tended to surface and dominate their thoughts. Still, they couldn't make themselves give up the conversations. The guilt for these verbal infidelities was eating her alive. Sam knew, from things that Daniel had said, that he was not liking himself very well either. She gained a new respect for drug addicts. If this was what it was like, she could begin to understand that it could be very difficult to "just say no."

Jack had had to cancel the weekend after they got engaged, but he was coming the following weekend. Sam was desperate about how she was going to hold him off sexually. She dreaded shopping for an engagement ring that she intended to return as soon as possible. She called Daniel Thursday night, needing his comfort more than ever.

"You sound really tense," Daniel said.

"This is going to be so hard. I think I know how to handle the no sex thing. I-"

Daniel interrupted, "Which involves NO sex, right? It makes me crazy thinking about his hands on you."

Sam couldn't help but feel just a little gratified by Daniel's possessiveness and jealousy, but it wasn't helping. "I couldn't. You do trust me, don't you?"

"I'm sorry, Sam. I'm just jealous and impatient for having you to myself."

Sam picked up her earlier thread. "I also have an idea of something that might help lead Jack to the realization that this isn't going to work."

"Really? Tell me because I've been coming up empty."

"I'm going to be with the kids eventually right? If I'm with them, I'll be their foster mother if nothing else."

"Right, and?"

"Well, I should start spending significant time with them now. If I drag Jack along, he won't like it. If he begins to understand that I'm not going to give the kids up for him, it might make a difference." Daniel started to object and she said, "Give me a minute more. Dan asked me to search my heart and not fight the feelings I found. I love those kids, Daniel. I'm tired of letting Jack's jealousy interfere with the promptings in my heart. Now, I'm finished. What do you think?"

"Sam, you know I love you and I trust you. I'm just… I… It's that those kids are in my care. If you do this, there can't be any backing down. You can't bow out of their lives, even if you stay with Jack."

It hurt her to hear his words and know that there were still reservations there. She knew, however, that they came from his deep sense of responsibility to a dead man and it was hard to fault him.

"I promise you, Daniel. I will end it with Jack and I will never deny what I know in my heart is intended for me and those children."

"I wish I could be with you and kiss you as tenderly as I want to for those words," Daniel said. His voice was husky and rough.

"I wish you were too," she said, dreamily. "I keep thinking about how much I want to run my fingers through your hair. You know it looks so silky to me now that you've let it grow out again, but I've never really touched it."

He gave a low moan. "Sam, we've got to hang up. It makes me feel like a heel when I talk to you like this. I keep thinking how Jack would feel if he heard us."

She felt like crying, but she knew he was right. "Good night my darling. I love you."

He said, "I love you too," and then there was the click of the hangup and the start of the dial tone. Her room felt as cold and lonely as the Artic.

When Sam went into work the next morning, she found a manila envelope under her door. An intricately detailed piece of artwork was inside, almost every inch of the paper covered with carefully applied crayon. It showed a birthday cake with nine candles surrounded by what appeared to be two small children and four adults. The woman next to the little boy had short blonde hair and blue eyes and was wearing something that was probably a BDU. A huge smile had been plastered on the face of the little boy. Printed unevenly across the bottom were the words, "Please come, love Mitch." 

She fished in the envelope for something else that might explain the picture. She found a note from Daniel saying, "Mitch's birthday is Monday. I think I told you we are planning a party for him tomorrow, a kids' thing. He surprised me with this first thing this morning before he went to school and begged me to ask you to come too. Things start up at 1:00. Please do come if you can and bring Jack. Daniel."

The note was almost impersonal. She reasoned Daniel was afraid that Jack might see it. She started to tear up looking at Mitch's artwork which was amazingly good for a child who was about to be 9. The child's interest in her made her feel ten feet tall. Sam thought about the beautifully wrapped present that was already at home in a closet. She hadn't thought she'd be giving it to him in person. Suddenly she was nervous about whether it was the right thing. The task of being a mother yawned before her, like a huge pit full of snakes. She told herself that if you loved them, surely you couldn't go too wrong. A little voice in the back of her head said, "Yeah. Right. You just keep telling yourself that."

Sam put the picture on the wall opposite her desk with great care. She admonished her inner voice, "Like it or lump it. It's happening so get with the program."

Jack arrived in Colorado Springs around 9:00 PM. Friday. He had a message on his cell from Sam saying that their mission that day had gotten complicated, they had gotten back later than expected, and Landry wanted them to debrief immediately. It all added up to a late night. Jack thought fleetingly about how Sara hadn't had a career as much as a job and had never been the one to work late or be unavailable. Some sort of cosmic justice seemed to be at work, payback for all the times Sara had been alone while he served all over the globe.

He decided to go to a sports bar, have a Guinness, and watch a game. He could do that at Sam's or at the condo he had recently acquired in Colorado Springs, but he found that, lately, he didn't want to be alone. He didn't want to interact with strangers, but he wanted people—life--around him. He found a likely spot and, beer in hand, wandered over to the pool tables at the back. A young man was methodically running the table, an amazing achievement because he also appeared to be drunk. When he had utterly vanquished his opponent, he got in the man's face and said, "I guess I'm pretty damn good at this for a snotty nosed kid." His words were belligerent, if slurred. Jack immediately realized that there must have been some hot words exchanged earlier.

The boy's opponent, a beefy man who either took steroids or had an unfortunate genetic propensity to grotesque musculature, growled, "Or maybe you just got lucky." Their bodies were tense and Jack knew they were minutes away from exchanging blows. He didn't think the teenager would be likely to get seriously beaten up in the middle of the prosperous looking crowd, but, he noticed, now that he got a good look at him, that the boy appeared familiar. He couldn't place him, but thought there was a good chance that he would turn out to be the son of someone he knew or maybe even a young soldier stationed at the Mountain. Jack stepped forward and said heartily, "There you are. Sorry I'm late." He clapped the boy on the shoulder and pulled him away from the other man.

"You know this kid?" the guy asked, "I suggest you take him back to his playpen before he gets his diaper crammed down his throat." He blocked their path. "You look like you might need some Depends yourself, old man," he tacked on looking at Jack.

Jack hadn't been in a bar fight for a long time, but he was in a bad mood and feeling very sensitive about his age at that precise moment. He set his beer on a nearby table with exaggerated care and turned to the man who looked at him with a dumb ass expression, clearly clueless as to with whom he was dealing. In a series of quick moves, Jack two-fingered the fellow in a critical nerve cluster, got him in an unbreakable grip, and hissed in his ear, "I've killed a lot of guys in the service of my country. I would regard getting rid of an asshole like you as part of the standing orders I operate under to protect and defend. You want to go a round with me?"

It was all done so quickly and economically that hardly anyone around them even noticed that something was going on. The man went quite still. Jack could smell his fear. "Let's just forget it," the man said hastily.

"If you apologize about all the diaper related remarks and immediately find yourself another place to be," Jack said in a voice laden with cold menace.

"I'm sorry, okay?" he said. He was quite sincere, but Jack imagined he was mainly sorry things had gone south so fast.

"Glad to hear it," Jack said and escorted him to the door. 

When he returned, the young man was propped up against the wall next to the pool table, drinking Jack's beer. Jack sighed. This kid didn't need to be running loose. "How about we get you home?" he asked. He decided not to try to reclaim his beer. Jack wasn't fastidious, but he wasn't into sharing his glass with people he didn't know.

"Can't go home, Jack," the fellow said. "My new dad would have a cow because he would probably think I'm not completely sober."

"I wonder why?" Jack asked rhetorically. He took a hold of his arm, doubly glad that he had acted since it was clear the kid knew him, and steered him toward a vacant booth toward the back. "How about you have a sit then."

The boy had finished Jack's Guinness by the time they sat down. When the waitress appeared, he tried to order another but Jack substituted coffee. "Why is it that everyone in sight thinks they're my keeper?" he groused.

"You are drinking with bad id, am I right?"

The boy flushed. "Laws here are stoopid. Back home, while I still had one, people didn't make laws about everything."

"Where's that?"

The boy laughed without any real amusement behind it. "You know, Jack. In a galaxy far, far away. Only we can't get back there. They're all gone." He closed his eyes and Jack thought he was entering the maudlin phase of drunkenness as he repeated very sadly, "All gone. My girl and my planet. All gone."

The pieces fell into place. Jack said, "Your Daniel's kid, Jake, aren't you?"

Jake's head snapped up. "I live with Daniel Jackson. I'm Dan's kid."

"If you think you're old enough to drink in public, then you need to be enough of a grown up to keep your mouth shut in public when it needs to be shut," Jack said in a low voice. "What do you think Dan would say about your behavior in the past few minutes?"

Jake looked defiant, but he nodded reluctantly. The waitress appeared right then with the coffee. Jack said, "Could you go ahead and bring a second cup or maybe just leave the pot?" He pushed the cup closer to Jake after she set it down and said, "You're about to drink a lot of coffee and then I'm going to drive you home."

Sam finally showed up at her place shortly before midnight. Jack was sitting pensively in front of the TV, not really watching what was on, and thinking about the challenge Daniel had in Jake. All the grief and confusion weighing on Jake's mind had jolted Jack a little out of his self-imposed emotional solitary confinement and he was reminded that he wasn't the only one in the universe with problems. The kid was obviously very bright, but he was a whole different kind of person than Daniel, one who was very physical and sports oriented and lacked even a trace of the pacifist. Talking to him, Jack thought that Jake and Daniel hadn't really connected yet, although Jake had a reluctant respect for the way Daniel was attempting to father his siblings. Jake had talked for a solid hour, mostly about the girl he had loved on Abydos, Sha're's daughter. The fact that Jake was still loyally honoring his love for her reminded Jack of Daniel's commitment to Sha're even after he had lost her. At least in that respect, the two were alike.

Sam leaned over and kissed him on the check and then sat down next to him. "I'm so sorry Jack for being late. Did you find something to do?"

Jack just said, "Sure." Jake's drunken episode was his secret with the boy. He reached for her then, but she slipped out of his grasp and stood up. She was worrying her lip and Jack groaned to himself, thinking, please no more emotion right now. He had really hoped that giving in on the marriage would buy him some peace and quiet for awhile.

"There's something we need to talk about," Sam said.

Jack thought, I knew it. "How about we just have some quality time together and talk about it tomorrow?" He made another move in her direction but she eased away from him again.

"That's just it," she said. "There's no easy way to say this, but, I think, we should quit with the quality time for awhile."

"WHAT?"

"The thing is Jack, our relationship, ever since we got together, has been mostly sex. It's so ever present that we don't know what else we have. It isn't enough to build a marriage on. I think we should quit making love long enough to find out if we are really compatible."

"You're serious," he said. He didn't pose it as a question because he knew damn well that she was.

"I am. My parents should never have gotten married. They cared about each other, but all they had really was physical attraction and my brother and I who resulted from it. When all the strains of a military marriage began to tear at them, they didn't have anything but sex as a counterweight. It wasn't enough. I mean I was a kid and I didn't understand all of it at the time, but Dad talked about it later."

"Sam, do you seriously believe that we are that ill-suited?" he asked with a sinking feeling.

"I hope not Jack, but I need to know." She looked so tense and unhappy. For just a moment he thought, this relationship hasn't done her any favors. When was the last time she looked really happy since we got together?

He did love her. He could be a pissant about this--his first instinct was to pitch a fit and try to intimidate her into changing her mind--but he knew Sam didn't really do being intimidated. Something about his encounter with Jake had made him reluctant to go that route. He simply said, "Okay, Sam, but I think I'll go to my condo. Staying here under your roof, but unable to touch you might make me a little crazy."

She looked very contrite but there was also relief there. Maybe she'd been afraid of an ugly scene. He had real plans to break something once he got out of her sight, but he hated to see her distress and really wanted to get ugly all alone.

"Something else I should mention to you. I hope you're not too upset about this, but tomorrow is Mitch Jackson's birthday party. The kid asked me personally if I could come and I didn't see how I could say no. We're both invited, of course. There'll be time to go look at rings after."

It just kept getting better and better. "What time are we supposed to show up for that?"

"At 1:00. Why don't you come by in the morning and we can have some brunch and go over there together. I've got a gift from both of us."

Jack stood and stretched. He was thinking he needed to go run about five miles although doing that in a dark and cold Colorado night didn't seem wise. Maybe he would go to the Mountain and use the facilities there. He didn't want to think any more and he didn't want to lie in bed, not tired enough to go to sleep, while his mind spun over all the unpleasant surprises of the day.

"I'm going to go then," he said, walking to her and pulling her close. He looked down into her face and saw that she still looked unhappy. "I'm okay, Sam. I'm not happy about this, but something tells me that fighting you about it wouldn't get me anywhere."

She smiled, still troubled, but relaxing a little. "There's nothing in the rules against kissing is there?" he asked, unable to believe she would go that far.

"Of course not," she said and she closed her eyes and kissed him. It was a nice kiss, but it felt different to him somehow. Maybe he was paranoid.

"Dream about me," he said lightly and left without any more discussion. As he pounded around the indoor track at Cheyenne Mountain, he felt like he was in a race he didn't understand and hadn't signed up for. He just hoped he could stay the course. 


	7. Chapter 7

2007 

"This has turned into a complete circus," Daniel said to Cam. He felt incredibly harried. A small party for 8 children had mushroomed to include friends of the other three children and several adults, the latter all added within the past 24 hours or so. First Cam had informed Daniel that he had drafted Carolyn Lam and her colleague from the SGC medical team, Dr. Bay DeBarr, to help. Daniel had snorted and said, "Cam, if you want to date Carolyn, why don't you just ask her out?"

Cam acted innocent and said, "I don't know where you're getting that."

"From what Dan told me, the two of you were regular Lotharios in high school. Where is all this shyness coming from?"

"Lotharios?"

"Don't start acting Jack-style dumb," Daniel said. "He'll be here and he will be filling that role." The addition of Jack and Sam, while delighting Daniel as far as seeing Sam, had him really worried. They would have to maintain the fiction that there was nothing between them in front of, as Dan would have said, "hell and half of Georgia."

"Okay, so you drafted Bay and Carolyn. How did Liz MacDuff and Lina Ragen get involved? I'm not sure they even know Mitch," Daniel continued. He liked Liz, a pretty young geologist with the SGC, and Lina, an intriguing refugee from another planet who was now part of the SGC, but they did seem to be an inclusion from out in left field, way, way out in left field.

"Actually they do, but I really asked them, on your behalf of course, because of Sergeant Harriman."

"Walter?" Daniel said, his voice little more than a squeak. "You asked them FOR ME because of Walter? Did you mention at some point that he's coming?"

"You like Walter and Mitch loves him."

"Yes," Daniel said slowly. "By the time we left the Mountain, Mitch had established close, personal relationships with what seemed like half the people there. Please tell me you haven't invited all of them."

"No, but surely you've noticed Walter's interest in Liz MacDuff?"

"No," Daniel said.

"You've been preoccupied. So I asked Liz so he could have an opportunity to socialize with her, but then I asked Lina because we didn't want to be too obviously pairing up Walter and Liz."

Daniel had quit fussing with balloons and was leaning up against the kitchen wall, his arms crossed, watching Cam like he was a floor show. "Of course we wouldn't," he said.

"I figured Liz would be more comfortable arriving with someone. Liz and Lina are really good friends," he pointed out to an eye rolling Daniel. "I did tell you that I arranged for Catering by Antoinette to bring some heavy hors d'ouevres so you wouldn't have to worry about anything but kids' food?"

Daniel just looked at him. Finally he said, "Are there any other adults besides Bay and Carolyn, Walter, Lina and Liz, Antoinette, who you of course asked to stay awhile after she brought the food?" Cam nodded with a 'what else was I supposed to do?' expression. Daniel finished, "and Jack and Sam?"

"Yeah you did mention Jack being here. I don't get that."

"Right," Daniel said, plunged back into panic at the thought. He decided then and there that he was going to unilaterally tell Cam all. Sam might not like it, but he needed support. "Sam and I decided that it would help her to end things with Jack if he was made painfully aware of the involvement she's going to have with the kids."

"Wait. Just wait. We'll get to the breaking things off with Jack in a moment, but did you not ask her to stay away from the kids because her indecision was confusing them?"

"That was before we discovered we were in love," Daniel said calmly.

"You're in LOVE!" Cam ended rather loudly.

"Ssssh," Daniel said. "She's going to break it off with Jack, but she's worried about hurting him."

Cam shook his head. "You don't want to hear what I think about all this."

"Actually, I don't," Daniel said. He slapped Cam on the back. "I know you're worried that it's not going to work out but it's meant to be. It will be okay." He took in Cam's dubious expression. "I promise."

SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS

Sam and Jack got to Daniel's about 1:30. This drove Sam crazy, but Jack kept telling her it was poor form to ever get to any party right when it started. He claimed that this discombobulated the hosts who were generally not really ready because they didn't expect anyone to be on time.

"This is a children's party, Jack," she said, not too patiently, "not a cocktail party with a bunch of generals."

"They all act like children," Jack said. "No adjustment required." He nudged her gently to get her moving up the front walk.

Mitch himself opened the door and his face split into a huge smile at the sight of Sam. He didn't even seem to be unhappy at seeing Jack. He grabbed Sam's hand and dragged her into the house. "Look at all the balloons!" he said happily.

Sam quite honestly didn't think she had ever seen so many balloons in her life. She felt almost positive that Daniel had alleviated a bad case of nerves about the party by compulsively blowing up more and more balloons. It was sort of like how he could get stuck in a conversational topic and just natter on. "This is great Mitch," she said.

Jack added, "Do we get to pop any?"

Mitch looked at him horrified. "I'm making a rule right now," he said. "No popping."

"Okay," Jack said. "Where should I put this?" nodding down to the huge package in his arms.

"Wow!" Mitch said. It was almost as if his attention had been so focused on Sam that he hadn't noticed that Jack was carrying a very large gift. He towed Sam into the dining room where there was a large pile of gifts on the sideboard.

Jake and another boy in his late teens ambled into the dining room. Jake stopped in his tracks when he saw Jack. Sam watched curiously as Jack greeted Jake and introduced himself to his friend. Jake seemed to relate to Jack immediately. She realized that she really didn't know what Jack's relationship had been to Dan and Mandy's family in their own reality. Perhaps Jake and Jack had been close.

Mary Clare and another equally attractive girl appeared at that point. The boy with Jake, Justin, made puppy dog eyes at Mary Clare. She was oblivious to his interest. "Has anyone seen Cam?" she asked.

The other girl giggled and Mary Clare frowned at her. Jake rolled his eyes and Mary Clare gave him a dirty look and left the room, followed by her friend. Justin looked after her longingly and Jake said, "Give it up Justin. You're not even in uniform." Justin trailed after the girls anyway. Jake and Jack exchanged a look that seemed to be communicating some sort of message Sam wasn't getting. Jack said, "You wouldn't happen to have a pool table in the house would you?"

Jake looked at him a little warily, "Yeah. Daniel got one a few months ago."

"How about you show me whether you're any good, for a snotty nosed kid that is."

Jake laughed. "You're on," he responded. They wandered off and Sam was left wondering what had just happened.

Mitch conducted her next to the kitchen to show her the cake and then to the bonus room/playroom over the garage. Daniel was watching, hands on hips, as Carolyn and Bay were playing some game that involved a lot of shrieking with Mitch's guests, Catherine, and two of her friends. He gave Sam a heart stopping smile when she came up the stairs. Mitch ran to join in and Sam went to stand at Daniel's side.

"This isn't getting to you, is it?" Sam asked. Daniel had gone back to frowning after his initial pleasure at seeing her.

"I feel better when all the little ones are directly in sight. I can't help but be really worried that one of them is going to get hurt. They're flinging themselves around like rag dolls," he said, plaintively, pointing at the giggling mass of kids.

"We do have two medical doctors on the premises," Sam pointed out. She couldn't help but get a kick out of Daniel's mother hen act.

"Speaking of which," he said, "where the hell is Cam?"

"I don't follow," Sam said. Daniel just made a face.

Suddenly, Catherine started to cry. She came running across the room to Daniel and flung herself in his arms. Daniel looked over at Carolyn and Bay. Carolyn shrugged and Bay shook her head. Daniel couldn't get Catherine to talk about what was wrong so he picked her up and carried her downstairs, away from the craziness, with Sam right behind them. They went into the quiet living room and nodded at Walter, Lina, and Liz who were deep in conversation, standing in the doorway between the living room and the dining room. Daniel sat down in an armchair with Catherine in his lap and Sam perched on the arm of the chair. Sam leaned over and smoothed the child's soft, fine hair from her sweaty forehead. "What's wrong, sweetheart?" she asked gently.

Catherine looked up at her, blue eyes still leaking a few tears, and said, "Jenny said I was stupid and didn't know how to play the game right."

Sam said softly, "I know two things for sure. You are NOT stupid and Jenny is quite rude."

Catherine's face broke into a dazzling smile and Sam returned it, stunned with the power an adult feels when they make a child happy. Catherine reached up and put an arm around Sam's neck and hugged. Daniel and Sam's eyes met over the child's head. Sam's heart was in her eyes as was Daniel's and they were lost in each other for a very long minute. Something made them look up at last, to meet Jack's stricken brown eyes, where he stood with Jake just inside the door into the foyer.

"Daniel, how's it going?" Jack said, sounding a little like a robot who spoke the first words programmed to come out. Catherine slid off Daniel's lap and ran off. Sam thought, She's feeling better and there's about to be boring adult talk.

"It's good, Jack," Daniel said. "It's been way too long since I've seen you."

"I definitely should check up on you more often," Jack said. It seemed to Sam like that statement definitely had layers to it. Had she and Daniel been that obvious?

"Mary Clare tells me that you were a really fun uncle for the kids growing up. I know they'd love to learn to get to know you again," Daniel said. Sam thought he was about to go into his running on phase and really wanted to stop him. The whole situation was making her very uncomfortable.

Jack took care of it himself. "Look, it's been years since I've had this much exposure to little kids. I think I'm going to go take a quick walk around your neighborhood and fortify myself for the next round of the festivities." He lifted a hand in farewell and went off to get his jacket.

Jake strolled over to within a couple of feet of Sam and Daniel and said, "If he saw what I just saw… " He looked at them and then said, with surprising maturity, "You probably belong together, you're that much like my parents, but it isn't fair to him to not tell him the truth if something is going on."

Daniel clenched his hair. "I hear you Jake." He looked at Sam and she realized that Daniel was having a hard time believing there was any good reason to keep this farce up.

Sam grimaced. She didn't want to blow it with this kid before things even started. "Jake, there are things you don't know. It's really important to me not to hurt Jack and I'm just figuring out how to best do that."

Jake said, "Nothing is ever easy, is it?" and left, leaving Sam and Daniel staring after him, their mouths hanging open.

By 2:30 Cam had heard enough screaming, squealing little children for awhile and felt he needed a break. He felt guilty enough about how he had escalated the whole thing that he didn't feel he could actually leave. He decided a break might coincide nicely with making a move on Carolyn. He found Carolyn and pretended a muscle spasm. "I wasn't aware you were prone to those, Colonel," she said, not sounding too sympathetic.

"My calf is really seizing up badly," he said, straight faced. "Do you think you could, I don't know, massage it or something?"

"You want me to rub your leg?" she asked, laughing a little.

"Where's the sympathy?" he asked. "What about your oath?"

"Tell you what, Cameron Mitchell. Let's get a little privacy--maybe the upstairs bathroom would work--and we'll dispose of this whole situation."

He meekly followed her up the stairs, feigning a limp. They entered the bathroom and she swung the door closed behind them. It didn't latch and swung back open an inch or two. Cam noticed, but, didn't act on it. Carolyn said, "Okay, soldier. You want to make a pass at me, don't come up with a phony illness that compromises me professionally."

"Compromises you professionally?" he said incredulously.

"Whatever," she said. "Let's just kiss once, get all this ridiculous flirting that has gone on for months behind us, and go back to the party. Depending on how the kiss goes, we can pursue it later or close the door on the whole episode."

Cam looked at her astonished. This was a remarkable approach to romance that reduced it a clinical level he wasn't entirely sure about. "You want me to kiss you?"

"For an officer on the fast track to general, you seem to spend an awful lot of your time uncertain about what your course of action is," she said.

That wasn't the sort of challenge Cameron Mitchell was going to ignore and he put one arm around her waist and ran his thumb across her mouth, before dipping his head to kiss her. It wasn't a beginner's kiss and she didn't react like a woman who'd never been kissed before. It was actually morphing into something more than a kiss when Cam heard an out of place sound. He spent too much time in combat situations to shut off his soldier's awareness just because he was kissing someone. He lifted his eyes and saw Mary Clare staring at them through the gap in the door. He saw her face just long enough to know that she was distraught and then she was gone.

Jack had still not recovered from the tableau of mother, father, and child in the living room. It had been a real Norman Rockwell moment and he had felt like an out of place Salvador Dali or Picasso, unable and probably unwilling to ever paint that sort of picture himself. When he returned to the house from his walk, the children were sitting quietly in front of the TV watching a DVD. It was Mary Kate and Ashley and he would have preferred gum surgery. He went looking for a part of the house out of earshot of the Olsen twins. He wandered upstairs to the bonus room and found Mary Clare, sitting in the window seat alone. She looked up at him with such a sad face that instead of turning and leaving, he felt compelled to say, "Is something wrong? Are you okay?"

"Uncle Jack," she said, "it's awful."

Jack realized that his counterpart in another reality had a relationship with this young girl who looked so like Sam. She was too distraught at the moment to clearly differentiate him from the other Jack and he decided he would just have to temporarily step up to the role. "What's awful, honey?" he asked, sitting down on the window seat next to her.

"Sometimes you love someone so much you can't even see anyone else, but they don't love you back."

"Sometimes that happens," Jack agreed.

"You can walk around knowing that, but you still have hope until you see them with someone else."

Jack could only nod mutely.

She lifted her chin and squared her shoulders. "You know what? If it's meant to be, it will happen. If I'm meant to be the one, then it won't work out with anyone else. Eighteen is too young, but in six or seven years, who knows what might happen." She stood up and Jack followed suit. "Thank you Uncle Jack. It always helps to talk to you." She hugged him and tripped down the stairs, leaving him alone.

Jack stared out the window at the snow covered ground below. Did Mary Clare speak for him too or was he just seeing things that weren't there because he was jealous and scared deep down by the Parkinson's? She wasn't giving up. Couldn't he be at least as brave and determined as an eighteen year old girl? He sat there for a long time and when he descended to join in the gift opening, he still didn't have an answer.


	8. Chapter 8

2007

Sam sat in her office Monday morning, staring at her ring finger. The tasteful diamond solitaire set in platinum felt like a boulder, weighing down her hand and her heart. She knew this was not going to go over well with Daniel. When they had gotten ready to leave Daniel's Saturday, Jack had planted a real kiss on her in front of Daniel. She had seen Daniel's face. It was one thing for him to think about her staying with Jack for awhile longer in the abstract. It was another thing to be confronted with the actual fact and all its ramifications in person.

Sam had tried to act interested when they picked out the ring, but she just wanted to take the first thing she saw and get out of the store. Normally that was Jack's mode when it came to shopping. Buy it from a catalog or on line if you can. If you are forced to go to a store, get in and get out so fast the salespeople don't even get a chance to pounce on you. Although that was the Jack O'Neill shopping style as she had observed it to date, it was not how he had operated on Saturday. She was sure they had looked at every ring in the store, some of them more than once. He kept slanting her inscrutable looks, even more unreadable than usual. Half the time, she was sure the whole thing was some sort of a test. The rest of the time, she thought this was part of his sporadic attempts of late, ala the roses, to be more romantic and sensitive.

She had just lifted up her oh so-heavy-hand to pull a book down from the shelf behind her desk when there was a light rap on her door and Daniel entered without waiting for an invitation. The ring blazed in the overhead light and he said a few terse words in a language she didn't know. Sam was absolutely certain he was swearing. "That's a lovely ring, Colonel Carter," he said with exaggerated courtesy.

Sam flinched and put the book down on the desk, rather more forcefully than required. "Oh, really? I'm so glad you like it, Dr. Jackson." She didn't attempt to feign a reciprocal courtesy.

He glared at her for a moment, then turned and walked away. For a moment, she thought he was going to stalk out of her office and she actually reached out a hand, as if to stop him. Instead he shut the door and locked it. He turned and leaned against it. "Sam, I'm trying to trust you. I'm trying really hard, but I just can't understand how it can be better for Jack to draw out this charade. He guesses that something is going on now. We're just subjecting him to emotional turmoil for who knows how long until you tell him the truth. I think we ought to listen to Jake."

"Oh really?" Sam said again. She sounded like a broken doll, but she was too upset for creative repartee.

"Do you have any idea how it makes me feel to see someone else's ring on your hand? I've been here before, right? I had to watch my wife go off with Apothis. I had to help my wife deliver another man's child. I'm not going there again. If you can't either break it off with Jack very, very soon or tell me a convincing reason why not, I'm walking."

Being reminded of what he had already gone through with Sha're took most of the wind out of her sails. No man should have to endure what he had already endured and she was heaping more of the same, in a way, on his head. He was trying to be stern and hard now, but she could see the pain in his eyes, not just for himself but also for her. She walked across the room and stopped just short of touching him. "Would you have me break a promise to Jack?"

He sighed. "You have to decide that. You know how much I care about Jack. I rather doubt that any secret he has is something I would use against him or that would make me think less of him."

"It would kill him if he knew I told you. I can't do it," she said. "I've already betrayed everything else. I have to at least keep his secret."

Daniel looked at her for a long moment. "Okay." He grasped her upper arms and set her away from him, then turned and started to unlock the door.

She felt a huge wave of panic. "You can't go, not like this."

"Watch me."

She grabbed him, spun him around, pushed him up against the door, and kissed him. He was stiff and unresponsive at first, his fists clenched at his sides, but she kept kissing him, darting her tongue against his closed lips, demanding entrance. He caught fire at last, put his arms around her, and turned them so that she had her back to the wall next to the door. His hard, muscular body was pressed against her, his need evident, and his mouth hot on hers. For a few moments, she was focused on only him, on her need to make him stay, to keep waiting for her and on the incredible heat that every touch sparked in her. Mutual revulsion took them both at the same time. He pushed away from her and wiped the back of his hand across his mouth.

"I will not be a cheat, Sam, and I will not share," he said, vehemently. "You've got to end it with Jack." He did unlock the door then and left and she could only watch. After he was gone, she closed the door and leaned against it, her hand pressed the spot where he had been moments before, and began to cry. She slid down the door, sobbing harder and harder, to huddle against it in a miserable ball.

Daniel seemed to have a sixth sense about avoiding her for the next couple of days. Then SG-1 went on a three-week assignment that got extended another week to four weeks. It was the worst possible timing, but there wasn't anything she could do about it. Even if she hadn't been preoccupied and worried about Daniel, it wouldn't have been a fun mission. They had to deal with some of the rudest and most inconsiderate locals it had ever been their pleasure to encounter outside of outright armed hostilities. The Giltians were not only nasty to SG-1, they were very nasty to each other. The ruling council seemed to delight in playing key factions off against each other, merely to watch them squirm.

Taking refuge in their own company was not very successful either. Teal'c was withdrawn because of a huge fight with Ishta the weekend of Mitch's birthday party. He preferred to be alone and only talked in monosyllables. Sam knew exactly how he felt and longed to talk with him about Daniel, but, given his friendship with both Daniel and Jack, it seemed like that would unfairly put him in the middle. Captain Bernardo Alcalde, the new team member, developed some gastro-intestinal problem the first day and, although he was never sick enough to be sent home, he wasn't feeling sociable. When they weren't actually doing their job, he withdrew to his temporary quarters and communed with his innards. That left Cam who was uncharacteristically cool toward her.

Toward the end of the third week, she was leaving a meeting with the ruling council with Cam, when she got a clue that the assignment's timing might not just have been bad luck. Sam said, complaining about the inability of the council to decide to whom they were going to award the opportunity of interaction with the Tauri, "They just need to make up their mind and get on with it. It isn't fair to leave everyone hanging on the possibility that they will be the ones selected."

"If I ever needed an illustration of seeing the mote in someone else's eye when you have a log in your own, I'll have to remember that statement," he said.

"Huh?" Sam's knowledge of biblical references wasn't her strong suit, but she knew she had just been insulted.

"Think about what you're doing to Daniel and Jack and explain how that's any different than the ruling council's treatment of those petitioning to form a trade agreement with us," Cam said shortly and walked away from her.

How dare Daniel tell Mitchell about their relationship? It felt good to be angry with Daniel. She had spent three weeks beating herself up for the situation. She worked hard to fan the flame of resentment over his confession to Cam without even asking her first, but it was hard work. She kept seeing Daniel's face when he talked about what Sha're had done to him. Unbidden, Jack's face standing in the living room doorway at Daniel's came to her mind. He had reminded her of the little Spartan boy with the wolf gnawing at his stomach ever since then. Did it make sense for all three of them to be miserable?

SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS

Jack felt like a fool. He had decided to go to Colorado Springs to surprise Sam when she got back from her mission and hadn't bothered to confirm that the return was still as originally scheduled. He thought about getting right back on another plane and returning to DC, but wound up just driving around aimlessly. He kept replaying his last conversation with Sam in his mind from the night before she left. "You coming down with a cold?" he had asked.

She had sniffed a couple more times. "Yeah. I must have caught something from Catherine or Mitch."

"So you want to come to DC for the weekend when you get back?"

"I just feel really tired, Jack. I couldn't get the energy together right now to get myself on a plane. I doubt that I'm going to come back from the mission all refreshed. I'll probably just be more tired."

"How are Daniel and the kids doing?"

"Why would you think I'd know that?" she had asked. Her voice had been bitter and sad.

"Maybe because you work with him?" Jack had been surprised that he didn't feel like doing a little victory dance that she had apparently fought with Daniel. The man was his competition right?

"Look Jack, you don't have to fish around to try to figure out if there's something going on between Daniel and me. There isn't. Be happy, will you?" Her voice had started to break on the last sentence. "Jack, I just don't feel up to talking any more. I'm sorry. Good night."

Turning off a busy major artery into a quiet neighborhood, Jack said, "I can't make her happy." He spoke out loud, but he was in the car alone so there was no one to observe him talking to himself. If he tried to review his circumstances silently, his mind kept skittering away from the thoughts. They were too unpalatable. Maybe if he made a real conversation out of it, he would be more likely to stay on track.

"She hasn't been happy, not really, since we got together." He kept searching his memory for evidence to counter that statement. There had been one pleasant afternoon spent hiking in the mountains and he remembered they had gone to "The Upside of Anger" and laughed like fools. In an entire year, those were the only two things he could remember that had been any real fun other than all the sex.

He noticed to his surprise that he was on Daniel's street. He didn't remember consciously deciding to do that. Some sick fascination, akin to peeling sunburn or picking at a scab, caused him to continue down the street until he pulled up in front of the rambling pleasantly dowdy house. He sat and looked at it, the first floor blazing with lights, the upstairs dark. He checked his watch. It was 9:30. The kids were probably in bed. He remembered when he used to call Daniel and Sam "kids." Did that make him a dirty old man for doing the nasty with one of his kids? Didn't a kid belong with a kid?

He leaned his forehead against the steering wheel while years of memories of Daniel and Sam working together, talking in excited tones about things he didn't care to understand, and laughing at things he didn't think were particularly funny chased themselves through his memories.

SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS

Jake peered out the window again. "That car is still out there," he commented.

"What kind did you say it was?" Daniel asked. "What color?"

"Some sort of SUV. Can't tell the color. It is dark out there, you know."

"Do you suppose someone's in trouble somehow?"

Jake rolled his eyes. "Or casing the joint?"

Now it was Daniel's turn to roll his eyes. "Everything we have is dilapidated and stained with grape juice or peanut butter or some other kid induced depredation. The puppy everyone had to have pretty much finished off whatever had survived to that point. I put all my valuable artifacts in storage after Catherine and Mitch broke about $2,000 worth in the first week we were living together. What's left to steal?"

Jake turned back and looked at him. "We just came in and wrecked your life didn't we?" Daniel searched for Jake's typical almost Jack-like sarcasm in the comment but it wasn't there this time.

He put his book aside and said, "I'm not going to lie to you. It was an adjustment, but I never really minded because the one thing I've been missing most of my life was a family. SG-1 was a substitute of sorts, but only a substitute. If you knew more about my life, you might understand that, but you've never been curious. Mitch and Catherine, they've pestered me for stories about when I was a little boy. Even Mary Clare's asked a few questions, but not you."

Jake sat down and looked at him. "Your mother isn't alive anymore, I know that and I know you didn't know Uncle Cam when you were growing up. Other than that, was it really that much different than my dad's life?"

"Both my parents died in the accident that just killed your dad's father. My only living relative, my maternal grandfather, didn't want me. I grew up in a series of foster homes. I think the longest any of them lasted was two years. There was some abuse in a couple of them and neglect in most of them. I was way ahead of myself in school and started college at 16. I was always regarded as odd and I never belonged. Is that different enough for you?" Daniel's voice was mild. He had come to terms with his wretched childhood a long time ago and had stopped feeling sorry for himself over it. He knew he would be someone different if he hadn't lived through it and he had finally come to the place where he was very happy with being who he was.

Jake looked consternated. "My mom went through a foster home experience a lot like that. She didn't like to talk about it, but the few times she did, I could tell how much it had hurt her." He picked at a callous on his palm. "I guess I'm a jerk. You've taken in my family and I haven't given anything back."

Daniel said, quietly, patiently, "You were mourning your dad and you resented me for playing a parental role with Mitch and Catherine and eventually with Mary Clare. It's a lot easier to dislike someone and give them a hard time, if you don't think of them as people with problems of their own. I don't blame you."

Jake looked at him, still upset, then stood up abruptly and walked back to the window. Daniel thought, somehow Dan and Mandy managed to have a kid that reminds me forcefully of Jack a good deal of the time and, now, Jack-like he's exceeded his quota of emotional conversation, probably for the next month.

"I think we should check that car out. There is someone sitting in it, it's below freezing, and I honestly think they've been out there for close to an hour."

"You're not going out there alone," Daniel said.

Jake looked at him for a moment and then laughed a little. "That's right. My dad was an athlete in school and you weren't, but, on the other hand, my dad never had any combat training and experience like you have."

Daniel flipped on the porch lights and grabbed a flashlight from the shelf in the front hall closet. The two Jacksons went out through the frosty dead grass to the street and approached the car, one from the street side and one from the sidewalk. At first Daniel thought the man in the car had had a heart attack, looking at him slumped over the wheel. When he looked up at their approach, Daniel was startled to recognize Jack. Jack stared back at him blankly and Daniel tapped on the window.

Jack put the window down a crack and Daniel said, trying to sound like there was nothing unusual in the situation, "Jake and I were wondering if you'd like to come on in for some coffee."

Jake added, "Or brandy. It's too fraking cold out here."

Jack seemed to go through some minor internal struggle, then shrugged and said, "What the hell. I'm here, right?"

He followed them back into the house and Daniel said, "Do you want to go with the coffee or the brandy?"

Jack looked over at the partially filled snifter sitting next to a heavy archeological tome on the table by the armchair and said, "It looks like the brandy bottle is already open. I'll join you."

"I'll get it, Daniel," Jake offered. "Do you mind if I have some?"

"You're not going out in the car, right?" Jake shook his head. "You're 18. They'd consider you old enough to put on a uniform and kill someone. You ought to be old enough to drink. Go ahead."

Jake looked surprised. Daniel realized Jake had never asked before because he had simply assumed the answer would be no. He sighed. From the beginning, Jake had painted him as a martinet because Daniel had tried to impose stricter discipline than earth mother Mandy and her laid back husband had practiced.

While Jake was in the kitchen, Jack gestured at the brandy. "I'm surprised to see you drinking."

"Being as I'm such a fun guy?" Daniel asked, a slight edge to his voice.

Jack looked at him reproachfully and Daniel flushed slightly. "I'm sorry, Jack. That was uncalled for. I was sitting here until a few moments ago having a pity party. I guess it's left me out of sorts."

An expression of something deeply disturbed drifted across Jack's face and was gone before Daniel could identify it. Jake returned with the two glasses and sat down on the other end of the couch from Jack.

Jack turned to Jake and asked, "So how's it going?"

"Still weird. It's all the little things that you don't think to ask people. I was never much of a talker, but now I hardly open my mouth. It's too easy to get into trouble. Like just today, someone was talking about their grandfather dying of Parkinson's. I barely caught myself in time before I said something stupid. There was a cure for Parkinson's in my reality."

"Really?" Jack said. He sounded rather excited.

"Yeah. It was something we found on one of Horus' planets and brought back." The Stargate had been public knowledge in Dan and Mandy's reality since the fourth year of the program.

"You don't remember which planet do you?" Jack asked.

"No. I'm sorry. But Horus was pretty minor, right? The least powerful of all the system lords. The planet was advanced in biotechnology. That wasn't the only thing we found there."

"It's amazing hearing all this classified info from a kid," Jack said with a smile. He turned to Daniel. "The SGC should check that out, don't you think Daniel?" Jack said. His amusement had fled and he was dead serious and intense.

"Sounds like a good idea to me," Daniel said. "I'll suggest it to Cam." He looked narrowly at Jack. "This means a lot to you for some reason."

"It would mean a lot to anyone." 

Daniel looked at Jack dubiously. Jake glanced at his watch. "I've got a call to make. I'm glad you dropped by Jack. Daniel has been really down about something for weeks. Maybe you could tell him some of those crazy stories you used to tell us and get him to smile a little. Usually Uncle Cam does that, but he's been offworld."

He exited the room and Daniel kept his head down, studying his brandy to avoid looking at Jack. Jake teetered between amazing insightfulness and maturity and hamhanded social blunders like this one. What was Jack supposed to do with an announcement like that?

Daniel said, "I've just had a persistent cold, been sort of tired and run down. Don't mind Jake."

His head jerked up when Jack said, very quietly, "About once a decade I decide it's time to have a heart to heart with someone. This decade it's going to be you." 


	9. Chapter 9

2007 

Daniel blinked and shook his head slightly. He did better with alcohol than he had done when he first met Jack, but he was still not a regular drinker. He dropped his head again and regarded the brandy in his glass with suspicion.

"Daniel, I'm serious. Look at me," Jack said, with a definite tone of command.

Reflexively, Daniel complied. "What do you want to talk about?" he asked. Inside a little voice was saying, "Please don't lay the whole Sam thing on me, please, please, please."

"Sam, interestingly enough, seems to have the same general cold and exhaustion you have."

"I didn't think she was back yet?" Daniel said. Now he was confused.

"She's not. I talked with her right before she left and it was quite obvious the two of you had had some sort of a falling out. Do you want to tell me what it was about?"

"No," Daniel said, baldly.

"Let me hazard a guess. You didn't like her taking the engagement ring."

"Hell, she's engaged to you. You're the most important thing in her life. Why shouldn't she take it?" Try as he might, Daniel couldn't keep the bitterness completely out of his voice. He took a large swallow of the brandy and coughed.

Jack waited until his coughing fit had subsided. "Daniel, I got engaged once before and I'll tell you right now, it was a whole other experience. Sara was so excited. She showed the ring to everyone. She was bubbling over with wedding plans. Sam couldn't wait to get out of the store. She jammed her hand in her pocket like it was covered with the famous heartbreak of psoriasis. I have to ask myself why spending $2,000 on a ring for a woman left her weepy and tired?"

Daniel sighed. "Jack, I don't think I should be talking about Sam with you. I think that's a conversation you should have with her."

"Maybe, if I was going to get a straight answer." He scooted forward in his seat so that their knees were almost touching. "Daniel, I love the woman. I want her to be happy and she isn't. I need to find out what's going on."

"Jack," Daniel said slowly. "I can't speak for Sam, for what's going on in her head. All I know is that she told me that there was something really difficult you were facing now and that she had promised you that she wouldn't tell anyone what it was. She is very worried about you and very unwilling to hurt you in any way, particularly now."

"Do you love her, Daniel?" Daniel had tried to steel himself for that question which he thought had a strong probability of coming at him, but found that he still wasn't prepared.

He put his head in his hands. "Jack, it totally surprised me. She always had Jack's property stamped on her forehead, at least by the time Sha're was gone and I even allowed myself to look at other women. I never let myself even consider it. The kids though, knowing that our counterparts produced them, it made me start turning over the possibility in my mind of the two of us together. I'm running on again, huh? Yes, Jack, I love her, more than I loved Sha're, more than I've ever loved anyone in my life."

"You have her kids, sort of," Jack said.

"So I should let you have her–-everybody gets something. Is that the proposal on the table?"

"That sounded sort of stupid," Jack said.

"Look, this is fruitless really. She's the one making the decision. Jack, I do want you to know one thing. You've always been very important to me. I love you like a brother. It's really bothered me the distance between us of late, particularly since you got together with Sam. Whatever happens with her, if you're facing something tough, I want to be there for you. The alternate reality Uncle Jack was a big deal in the older two kids' lives since the family only relocated to Abydos about 5 years ago. I know Mitch and Mary Clare would want to be there for you. Please let us be your family."

Jack looked at Daniel for a long minute. His brown eyes appeared moist and Daniel thought, Jack doesn't trust himself to speak. At last he stood up and Daniel stood up too. Jack hugged Daniel hard for just a moment. "We're a social species aren't we Daniel? It's like the way monkeys have to have other monkeys to pick things off them. I've made the mistake of trying to go it almost alone and putting the virtually entire burden on Sam which isn't fair to her. I'll be in touch, Space Monkey."

He left and Daniel sat unmoving in his chair for a long moment, the brandy forgotten, wishing that there was some unseen power that could hear him, that could answer the plea in his heart and make it all right for all of them. He'd have to ask the kids to pray for him. They definitely believed someone was listening.

SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS

When Sam got back at last, she went looking for Daniel and didn't find him. She had spent way too much time mulling over the situation and didn't have confidence in anything any more. She wasn't even sure that if she did break it off with Jack, Daniel would still want her. She was in that uncertain frame of mind when she got a call from Jack.

"How did the mission go?"

"It was the worst. The locals have less appealing personalities than Osama Bin Laden, Teal'c was obsessing unhappily over Ishta, Cam was pissed at me, and Alcalde had the runs the whole time."

"That good, huh? Well, I've got something special planned to help take your mind off it."

Sam groaned inwardly. She really didn't think she could fake a good time with Jack, but she wasn't going to end it with him until she talked to Daniel. There was no point in breaking Jack's heart if it wasn't going to serve any useful purpose. "Jack, I don't know…"

"I'm not taking no for an answer. I want you to get all dressed up and come by my condo at 7:30 sharp."

"Jack, please. I don't think I'd be much fun."

"Nonsense. You heard me Colonel. Be there." He hung up.

Sam was too tired to rebel although the entire time she was changing into a simple black crepe dress with a swingy, flared skirt that ended just above the knees, she was thinking, things are going to have to change after the wedding, if there is one. I'm NOT spending the rest of my taking orders in my private life.

She arrived on time as directed and noticed the Catering by Antoinette van in the driveway. She was encouraged to think that at least there would be good food and lots of nice touches. Antoinette was a marvel. Cam had gotten to know her when she waited on him repeatedly at Cracker Barrel. He had ended up being one of those who had invested in her little catering company and it was a howling success. Antoinette didn't just bring you food, she supplied flowers, candles, and whimsical touches like two turtle doves cooing together in a cage for an anniversary dinner. Antoinette opened the door and Sam's smile got even broader as she took in the spiked hair, midriff bearing top, belly button ring, and low cut jeans, incongruously topped with a BBQ apron around her neck and tied at her waist that proclaimed, "Dad Loves to Cook."

"Hey Colonel," Antoinette said, "come on in. General O'Neill said for you to get comfortable. He had to leave for a little bit."

Sam trailed after her into the house and started to follow her into the kitchen. "Nope. You're supposed to be having an elegant experience. The way I fling food around you'll end up with something on the front of that spiffy dress. Let me bring you a glass of wine and you have a seat."

Sam went to sit in the living room and look at the beautifully set and decorated table. A tray of hors d'oeuvres rested on the coffee table and Antoinette quickly appeared with a glass of Pinot Noir. Sam was still not excited about the evening but her spirits had been lifted a little.

SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS

Cam went straight to Daniel's from the Mountain. He always felt better about everything when he walked into this warm, noisy house. There always seemed to be extra children around and something happening. Mitch or Catherine or both would fling themselves at him, Jake would give him a low key but pleased greeting, and sweet Mary Clare would blushingly greet him. Then there was his true friend, Daniel. More than one Bible verse his granny had made him memorize about friends ran through his head and he thought how true they were when applied to Dr. Daniel Jackson.

However, this evening when he let himself in—no one expected him to knock--he found everyone but Mary Clare in the back of the house in the kitchen. Jake and Mitch were helping Daniel clear the table, that is everywhere but where Catherine was sitting. A plate with a mound of peas was in front of her and she was sitting with her arms crossed and a defiant expression on her face. "Can't make yourself taste the peas, but you aren't willing to give it up on dessert?" he asked her.

She nodded her head emphatically. "It's chess pie," she whispered.

"Oh, I see," he nodded solemnly. Chess pie was a Southern standby. Over the past year, Daniel's kids had wheedled a menu out of him heavy on biscuits, cornbread, grits, country ham, and other childhood favorites of his. It was just one more reason he loved coming there. Chess pie was as special favorite, but Daniel's little ones didn't get dessert if they hadn't eaten a reasonable meal and at least tasted everything on their plate. "How about if you pretended the peas were pills and popped them one at a time. I bet you could just swallow them without chewing."

He heard Daniel suppress a snort behind him. "Will we have a possible need to do the Heimlich maneuver on her then?" Mitch asked. He sounded almost hopeful. The boy was very impressed with the procedure, having seen a movie where a boy saved his little sister from death by executing it.

"I don't think so," Cam said. "What do you say?"

Catherine screwed up her face and downed 8 peas in rapid succession. Trying to hide a broad smile, Daniel brought her a slice of pie and took her plate. She disposed of it in short order with a blissful expression on her face and then ran off with Mitch. Jake also left. Cam said, "Everybody's eating kind of early aren't they?"

"Jack called. He asked me to come over and talk with him at 7:45. Jake and Mary Clare will watch the kids."

"7:45. Not 7:30 or 8:00?"

"Right. I guess timing really matters. He's got something going on that I promised to help with." Cam raised an eyebrow. "I don't know any details, but he said he wanted 'moral support' for a difficult conversation and it would be really good to have me there. He asked me to dress up a bit. I think his words were 'at least a nice sweater.'"

"That's weird," Cam said and helped himself to the last slice of pie.

"Did you even ask?" Daniel laughed. "I bet you didn't eat your peas."

"I never order them," Cam said. "There are some advantages to growing up." He leaned comfortably against the counter and started to eat his pie. "Where's Mary Clare?"

"Up in her room. She refused to eat dinner and I didn't want to make an issue of it. She's been very withdrawn and unhappy, I guess since Mitch's birthday party."

"Any idea why?" Cam asked. He already knew the answer. He just hoped Daniel didn't.

"She won't talk to me or the other kids. As much as she squabbles with him, she and her twin are really close. If she won't tell Jake, it worries me."

"Do you want me to talk to her?" He sure didn't want to, but he was a soldier and he knew that you didn't really get to chose all your missions.

"Would you? That would be great. I'm unhappy enough on my own without looking at her being miserable too." They exchanged a silent look.

"I'll go talk to her then," Cam said and put down the empty plate. He squeezed Daniel's arm before he left. "Sam came back just fine, if you might have been wondering."

He knocked on Mary Clare's door. "Mary Clare, it's Uncle Cam. Can I talk to you?"

There was movement in the room and the door was unlocked, but not opened. He took that as a yes and entered cautiously. She looked at him over the top of a pillow she was hugging to her chest and jerked her head at a rattan chair in front of her desk. He had barely seated himself when she blurted out, "I saw you kissing Dr. Lam and I know you saw me while you were kissing her and I also know why you think I'm unhappy."

"Okay," Cam said. "Is there anything left for me to say here?" He was trying to tease her, but it fell flat.

She buried her face in the pillow and her voice was muffled. "Look, you think I have a big crush on you, but it isn't just a crush. I love you. I'm too young for you now; I know that. That's what I've spent the last month coming to terms with--that and planning out my life. BUT the difference between 26 and early forties is completely different than between 18 and late thirties. We'll go our separate ways, but I'll still love you. If it's supposed to be, we'll find each other some day."

Cam was speechless. What was he supposed to say? Finally, he said, "You know I care about you and I doubt that I have ever been more honored by anything than to have you feel this way about me, but I don't want you wasting time thinking about me and ignoring the fellows your own age that could make you happy."

Mary Clare looked up at him, blushing furiously but determined to have her say. "I know who I am and what I want and I have to be true to that. Please go back downstairs, okay?"

SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS

Daniel pulled up to Jack's. Unlike Sam, he did not rejoice at the sight of the Catering by Antoinette van, although it would be good to see Antoinette. Jack had not said anything about a meal and he had already eaten once. He wondered if he could go in the bathroom and do the bulimia bit. He doubted if he could eat another bite, even of Antoinette's delicious food. He wondered briefly if Antoinette was the one Jack wanted his support in talking with, but that just was too far out to even consider.

He knocked on the door and Antoinette opened it and then stepped aside to show him Sam sitting in the living room, looking stunning. He gave his coat to Antoinette and stood awkwardly, tongue tied. It was the first time he had seen Sam since he had told her he was walking out on her.

The silence stretched out and he saw Antoinette flashing in and out of the dining room, depositing dishes. She reemerged with her coat and an envelope. "The meal is on the table, the dessert is on the kitchen counter and I'm going to leave now. Colonel O'Neill said that NO ONE was to clean anything up and I was to come back in the morning to do it. He also asked me to give this envelope to both of you."

Sam took the envelope, perplexed, and they both watched Antoinette briskly go out the door and hop in her van. "What does it say?" Daniel asked and crossed to sit on the couch with her, but as far away from her as possible.

She opened it, scanned it, scanned it again, and tears began to run down her cheeks and splash on the paper. She handed it to Daniel and picked up a cocktail napkin and started dabbing her face. Daniel read the note out loud.

"Dear Kids,

I can't be happy if the people I love aren't happy. You two belong together. Please spend the evening figuring that out. Sam, the ring was expensive so put it under the mattress. DO NOT CLEAN ANYTHING UP. YOU'LL PISS OFF ANTOINETTE.

Cheers,

Jack"

Daniel slid over next to Sam. She was crying in earnest now and it tore at his heart. "I decided that I had to be with you, no matter, what," she got out between sobs, "but I thought you might not want me any more and I didn't want to hurt Jack if there was no point. At least one of us had to be happy."

"Know this," Daniel said, taking another cocktail napkin and handing it to her with one hand while he kept the other wrapped around her. "I will never not want you and I will never stop loving you."

She turned a tear stained face up to him. "Can we really be together then?"

Daniel picked up her hand and carefully removed Jack's ring. He set it on the table. He pulled a chain out from under his soft blue cashmere sweater and there was a sapphire ring dangling at the end. "This is my mother's. I was going to give it to you as soon as you broke it off with Jack." He pulled it off over his head, unclasped it, and slid off the ring. He dropped to the floor on one knee and said, "Will you marry me?"

"Oh my love, as many times as you want, in as many realities as we ever find ourselves in," she said. He put the ring on her finger and she pulled him up, into her arms and began kissing him. He gloried in how much better kissing without any guilt felt. From that point forward, the evening was magical. They did NOT clean anything up.

The End


End file.
